A better developer experience for Native Client
By Christian Stefansen, Native Client Team
Native Client (NaCl)
enables you to write high-performance apps that run your C and C++ code in the browser. With
the new Native Client add-in for Microsoft Visual Studio and the new Native Client debugger it
just got a lot easier.
The Visual Studio add-in makes it easy to set up, build, run, and debug your app as a Pepper
plug-in and as a Native Client module. If you are porting an existing application to Native
Client, building as a Pepper plug-in is a convenient intermediate stage for development
enabling you to gradually rewrite the app to use the Pepper APIs (
video).
The Native Client debugger, affectionately called
nacl-gdb,
works on Windows, Mac, and Linux and is now available in the
SDK. So
whatever your development platform, you can now spend more time coding features and less time
chasing bugs with
printf.
Following the Native Client philosophy of being OS-independent and open source, nacl-gdb is
based on... well...
gdb! For those
of you who are not excited by a text interface, the Visual Studio
add-in
makes interacting with the debugger easier. If you use a different development environment
that can interact with gdb, you can point it to nacl-gdb and use the same commands plus some
additional NaCl-specific commands.
Whether you’re an existing Native Client developer or thinking about using Native Client for
your next project, now is a great time to
grab the
SDK, write an amazing app, and quickly squash any bugs you find. We look forward to
questions on
Stack
Overflow and ideas and comments in the discussion
forum.
Christian
Stefansen is the Product Manager for Native Client and Pepper (PPAPI). When he is
not busy planning new features for Native Client, he likes traveling and writing. He is
currently writing a book about India.
Posted by Scott Knaster,
Editor
