On Sat, Apr 24, 2010 at 06:17:25PM -0400, Nick Sabalausky wrote: > "it forces you to use their tool chain the whole way"
Check out the README: http://nativeclient.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/src/native_client/README.html Notice how the instructions don't say to use gcc and gdb, but instead nacl-gcc and nacl-gdb. The downloads say "source and toolchain". Wikipedia says that it is simply because the code have 32 byte alignment: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Native_Client (second paragraph) but nevertheless, an out of the box compiler isn't going to work for it. Then, once the code is written, you can't execute it without the Google browser plugin, integrated with Chrome and offered for Firefox, but not available for Internet Explorer. Maybe they'll offer one once it goes live, but I wouldn't count on it. Even so, odds are good that users won't have it installed anyway.