Ever wanted to create a hot new game with blazing 3D graphics that runs on the browser? Well, you can't. In the obviously untrustworthy and seedy world of the internet, allowing others to execute machine code on your PC is as safe a thing to do as leaving the doors and windows of your apartment open, publishing the directions to get there in the classifieds along with your credit card and and bank account details, and leaving everything behind for a three week vacation in the woods. Therefore almost all web technologies use some kind of virtual machine concept to shield the actual machine from the outside.
This works fine in most cases, and usually downright useful - where your don't have to worry about idiosyncrasies of each platform or memory leaks or corruptions. But when you really need to tap the full potential of the hardware, like a modern computer game, you are left stranded....
... until now. Google's Native Client "aims to give web developers access to the full power of the client's CPU while maintaining the browser neutrality, OS portability and safety that people expect from web applications". The project's homepage shows an example of Quake (1?) running on the browser, which is pretty neat. The tool chain seems to be based on gcc. License is BSD. Check it out. Hopefully it is a welcome respite from some of the bloat and sluggishness of Flash and Java.
Wednesday, February 25, 2009
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