PNaCl sounded interesting — I was really excited when I heard about it — but it's been pretty much dead for a long time now. Even normal NaCl got a lot more attention, and NaCl has not exactly been heartily embraced.
People are only recently starting to talk about PNaCl because it's the only alternative to asm.js, and for some reason some people have such strong negative reactions to the idea of a highly performant language that isn't a bytecode that they'll support a defunct Google experiment before a low-level JavaScript subset.
The problem with NaCl is that it is platform dependent. It is the 386 real mode instruction set which means it is bad for mobile platforms since nearly all of them are ARM based. NaCl will be slower to run since ARM devices will have to emulate the 386 instruction set.
> With NaCl one has to provide multiple EXEs for each platform that one wants to support be it ARM, x86 or x64.
So websites written today wont be viewable/runnable on architectures created tomorrow unless someone goes back, updates the NaCl tooling, gets the updated NaCl tooling to the original author and convinces the original author to fix his broken, platform-dependent website.
Excuse me if I say that sounds like a bunch of horseshit. If this had been invented (and embraced) before the advent of mobile-devices, half the internet would be unusable on smart-phones and tablets now.
Why on earth would we ant to create that sort of problems for the future? Websites tend to stick around, maintained or not, and new things will always emerge.
NaCl is a bad idea for any cross-platform medium and the internet in particular. End of story. The only people rallying NaCl are Google-fanboys who can't even see past their Google Chrome browser when testing regular websites.
I can't wait for this non-standard monstrosity to die.
That's not how it works. The original NaCl targeted only 32-bit x86, but now they also produce binaries for x86_64 and ARM too. If you're running on ARM, you get an ARM NaCl binary.
People are only recently starting to talk about PNaCl because it's the only alternative to asm.js, and for some reason some people have such strong negative reactions to the idea of a highly performant language that isn't a bytecode that they'll support a defunct Google experiment before a low-level JavaScript subset.