Native Client now Supported on ARM

Google has announced that the latest release of their native Client SDK now supports the ARM architecture.

The Native Client technology, for those who haven’t been following its development, is Google’s answer to high-performance applications on the web. Native Client allows the execution of native code directly on users’ machines rather than being interpreted by a browser’s JavaScript engine.

With the Native Client SDK a developer can use code in C / C++ and compile it to a format that will run in Google Chrome across any operating system running Chrome. The only issue till now has been that only the x86 architectures were supported.

With the addition of ARM support, Google can have Native Client applications running on mobile devices, tablets, or other devices using the ARM architecture. This also makes it possible for Google to have future ChromeBooks based on ARM.

Further down the line, Google intends to make the technology truly platform-independent, by using LLVM bitcode, such that compiled applications run on any device, using any platform, as long as it supports Native Client, without needing to be recompiled for each platform. Google has named this next-generation design Portable Native Client, and it is expected to become available in 2013.