Comment by bawolff
4 hours ago
> The only major advantage of PNaCl vs early WASM was that PNaCl supported shared-memory threading right from the start (this is still knee-capped in WASM because of the COOP/COEP response header requirement).
Presumably that is because PNaCl predated spectre (?)
Indeed, NaCl and PNaCl would have been hit by Meltdown/Spectre at least as badly as SharedArrayBuffer.
I remember early during the Wasm design process we were openly speculating whether people would eventually figure out how to do stuff like Rowhammer from raw Javascript. My bet was on Yes, but I don't remember if any of my teammates said No. I think we all knew the writing was on the wall by then.