Clarification of EOL announcement refs - Nacl exception for extensions?

[Matthew Powers]

Hi list-

I had questions concerning the EOL plans - the two key references I know of are these:

https://blog.chromium.org/2017/05/goodbye-pnacl-hello-webassembly.html

 

-          We will remove support for PNaCl in the first quarter of 2018 everywhere except inside Chrome Apps and Extensions.

 

https://developer.chrome.com/native-client/migration

 

-          Given the momentum of cross-browser WebAssembly support, we plan to focus our native code efforts on WebAssembly going forward and plan to remove support for PNaCl in Q1 2018 (except for Chrome Apps). We believe that the vibrant ecosystem around WebAssembly makes it a better fit for new and existing high-performance web apps and that usage of PNaCl is sufficiently low to warrant deprecation.

 

When comparing these statements, I see that Nacl support for extensions will continue to work is specifically called out in one reference and the other reference says only Chrome Apps will continue to support Nacl.

Does anyone know for sure - is the second blog simply overlooking Extension usage and neglected to mention it?

thanks,

Matt

[Soeren Balko]

I would also be interested to hear an updated statement from Google on their plans to remove PNaCl from Chrome. 

AFAICS, WebAssembly has not yet caught up with PNaCl in terms of performance (no support for SIMD intrinsics and multithreading yet, some Pepper APIs such as video decoder/encoder are also not available in WebAssembly, etc.). Also, Chrome's support for WebAssembly seems to suffer from teething problems re stability under modest memory pressure ("Ah snap"). That being the case, we plan to move to running our PNaCl module inside a "companion" browser extension. At least that is until WebAssembly truly delivers in terms of performance, features, and stability. It would thus be great to get an up-to-date statement from Google, addressing the following concerns:

(1) Is the plan still to retire PNaCl from Chrome (except for browser extensions) in Q1/2018? If so, which Chrome release is going to be first affected? Or are these plans on hold while Chrome's WebAssembly support is still behind PNaCl?

(2) When will Chrome's WebAssembly implementation support SIMD intrinsics and multithreading?

(3) Will PNaCl indeed continue to run inside Chrome extensions?

[van...@gmail.com]

I am wondering the same thing. The performance of PNaCl is unmatched currently and we ported our app to WASM but its not performant enough.