Native Client @ Google

My buddy Brad Chen over at Google pointed me to their release today of Native Client, a project that lets you safely run native x86 code in the browser. Sure, you can run code in the browser today (JavaScript, ActiveX, Java Applets) but typically you have to give up on either portability or performance. The brainiacs over at Google have figured out how to get safe, portable, and performant code running across multiple operating systems.

I've always thought it would be fun to build a computing grid out of idle web clients. Of course the communication patterns would be limited to client server, but at least with NaCl code you don't have to run your compute processes in JavaScript.

For more details, check out the Google Code blog entry or the project page itself.