NativeClient

Go 1.3 includes support for generating x86-32 and x86-64 binaries for Google Native Client (NaCl).

NaCl is a collection of related technologies.

1. NaCl defines a collection of binary formats with specific code layout requirements. There are definitions for 32- and 64-bit x86 and 32-bit ARM.
2. NaCl provides a mechanism for running those binaries in a sandboxed execution environment with a restricted syscall-like interface. That syscall-like interface is not guaranteed to be stable from release to release.
3. To abstract away the syscall-like interface, NaCl defines a stable runtime API called the integrated runtime (IRT).
4. Using the IRT, Google Chrome defines an API called Pepper (aka PPAPI) that NaCl-based plugins use to interact with the browser.
5. To abstract away the machine-specific binary formats, NaCl defines an LLVM-based architecture-independent format called PNaCl.
6. NaCl provides translators from PNaCl format to the architecture-specific formats, invoked automatically, so that you can distribute just a PNaCl binary and execute on all three supported platforms.

Go 1.3 provides support for generating the architecture-specific binaries and using the raw syscall interface (1 and 2 in the list above), and only for the x86 platforms (not for ARM).

There is ongoing work exploring support for the IRT and PPAPI (3 and 4 in the list) but no definite release target. Perhaps they will be in Go 1.4 but perhaps not.

There are no concrete plans to support PNaCl (5 and 6 in the list).

The Go 1.3-generated NaCl binaries can be run using the NaCl SDK sel_ldr_x86_32 and sel_ldr_x86_64 programs. They cannot be run directly in Google Chrome. As such, the NaCl support in Go 1.3 is useful only for running sandboxed environments like the Go Playground. The file misc/nacl/README in the Go distribution explains how to configure your machine so that you can run and NaCl-sandboxed binaries using the go command.