google native client

i finally understand why google dropped chrome into the yet-another-browser mix: they are trying to take over the world. and it just might work. i’m about a year behind the official announcement, but i just found out about the native client project. sounds like what sun was originally trying to do with java, but in this case there is no need to rewrite everything in a new programming language. and there’s no performance hit from a bytecode compiler/virtual machine. everything runs native in a sandbox, with a recompile required to make jumps safe. the only real refactoring will be to take out disallowed system calls. write my code in linux, run it on windoze, mac, etc, anything that has intel hardware, and i will be able to deploy it through a website. now that’s cool, and it could actually swing people into the cloud computing mentality that will give google the home-field advantage. chrome is not just another browser; it will become a new virtual os. one dude got an unmodified python 2.6 to run by tweaking nacl and glibc to handle dynamic linking. i wonder if that is even necessary if i use cython to embed the interpreter and all modules into a static elf. at any rate, i hope google picks up his patches and charges ahead with this. i was just thinking about how to get around some of the restrictions of google appengine and offload some of the computation to the user’s machine. this would make both possible with minimal effort from me. need to keep an eye on this, and try it out eventually. like maybe when someone confirms scipy and numpy run under native-client. *fingers crossed*