Errrmmm....
Isn't this just Java reinvented?
Google has told the world that Native Client - its native-code browser plug-in - can now run on ARM chips. When the plug-in was first released a year ago, it only ran on x86 processors, but the company has now updated the platform for x86-64 and ARM. In a blog post, Google said that its initial tests indicate that on both …
Possibly.
But long before there was Java there was UCSD Pascal. 1978, or thereabouts. Same idea, portable machine-independent code.
To an outsider it looks like every generation of newbies in IT ignores everything that happened in the years before and thus reinvents their own wheels. The ideas of reuse and incremental improvement are not welcome. Not Invented Here rules, OK?
p-code came after the late 60's o-code, used in BCPL.
Elegant and expressive BCPL was sidelined by its illiterate bastard C derivative, which blighted my entire career even more than Microsoft the destroyer did. Forgive them Lord, for they knew not what they did.
Yes, this is also precisely Java and the JVM all over again, among others. In o-code days machine memory was about 10^5 bytes; today it's about 10^10. So with each order of magnitude increase, we've seen a new attempt at the same problem. Microsoft's is proprietary, natch. Maybe this LLVM iteration will finally stick, with Google's backing.
And for those not paying attention at the back of the class, this is the only way you're going to be able to distribute compiled code on the next generation of platforms without going via the platform owner's provenance-auditing app store. And a good thing too. Live with it, and get off Apple's case.
If browser plugins are adequately sandboxed and restricted to API's that don't threaten privacy or security, and battery life has been improved sufficiently, I see no reason why not. Of course the plugin itself would be delivered by Apple, not Google. (Like Chrome, Safari on Mac already runs plugins in a separate process.)