Ian
unread,Sep 29, 2009, 5:47:42 AM9/29/09Sign in to reply to author
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to Native Client Discuss
I have absolutely no idea what the planned future is for this project
(so forgive me if this has already been announced or discussed
elsewhere.) I very much doubt that I am the first person to think of
this - but it seems to me that if NaCl was enhanced so that a NEXE
could do everything with a browser that you can currently do in
Javascript (e.g. access the DOM etc.) then a logical next step might
be to create a compiler that compiled an entire web page (or perhaps
just the Javascript part) into a NEXE file. My understanding of the
Google Chrome V8 project is that it is essentially a Javascript
compiler already - producing native machine code which is then
executed (but not saved?) Perhaps it would not be very much work to
modify V8 to create a standalone compiler which generated a NEXE as
output when pointed at an HTML or JS file. GWT could then be enhanced
to compile straight from Java to NEXE (in addition to JS, since not
everyone will have NaCl installed to run the NEXE).
Of course the $64K question is - could this be made to perform better
than using Javascript with V8 in the current arrangement? Perhaps DOM
access between NaCl and browser might require inter-process-
communication overhead, which in DOM-heavy applications might
completely outweigh any performance gain from having pre-compiled code
in a NEXE file? (Although there might well be other possible benefits
such as total code obfuscation, reduced download time, improved
startup time etc. etc....)
Is this a technical possibility, or am I off on a complete tangent?
Ian