Maintaining a complex dual-sandbox architecture required immense engineering overhead to patch emerging vulnerabilities. NaCl vs. WebAssembly: A Quick Comparison Google NaCl / PNaCl WebAssembly (Wasm) Browser Support Google Chrome only All major browsers Standardization Proprietary (Google) W3C Open Standard Binary Format LLVM Bitcode ( .pexe ) Wasm Binary Format ( .wasm ) Security Model Software Fault Isolation Virtual Machine Sandbox Ecosystem Tied to Pepper API (PPAPI) Integrates directly with Web APIs & JavaScript Transitioning Legacy NaCl Code to Modern WebAssembly
Enter Google’s . It was an ambitious attempt to solve the "performance gap" by allowing C and C++ code to run directly in the browser, securely, without the need for a heavyweight third-party plugin like Flash or Java.
The NaCl web plugin offers several key features that make it an attractive solution for developers:
PNaCl compiled C/C++ code into an architecture-independent intermediate LLVM bitcode packaged in a .pexe file. When a user visited a website, the Chrome browser translated this intermediate bitcode into the host machine's specific architecture just before execution. Use Cases of NaCl and PNaCl
Use WebAssembly's native binding capabilities to pass data smoothly between your compiled C/C++ logic and the browser's JavaScript engine.