Google Chrome "Native Client": Beyond HTML/JavaScript

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Technical Overview - Native Client — Google Developers




Native Client product names follow a salt & pepper theme. Native Client, abbreviated to NaCl, started the salt & pepper naming theme.

The Pepper Plug-in API (PPAPI), called Pepper for convenience, is an open-source, cross-platform API for plug-in for web browsers. From the point of view of Native Client, Pepper is a set of APIs that allow a C or C++ Native Client module to communicate with the hosting browser and get access to system-level functions in a safe and portable way. One of the security constraints in Native Client is that modules cannot make any OS-level calls. Pepper provides analogous APIs that modules can target instead. You can use the Pepper APIs to:

talk to the JavaScript code in your application from the C++ code in your NaCl module

do FileIO

play audio

render 3D graphics
The HTML file contains the <embed> tag that loads the Native Client module. For example:

    <embed name="nacl_module"
           id="hello_world"
           width=0 height=0
           src="hello_world.nmf"
           type="application/x-nacl" />

Native Client modules are operating system independent, but they are not (yet) processor independent. Therefore, you must compile separate versions of a Native Client module for x86-32-bit, x86-64-bit, and other instruction sets. The manifest file, specified in the src attribute of the embed tag, specifies which version of the Native Client module to load, depending on the end-user's processor.