Google Debuts VS Add-in and Debugger for Native Client, for More Powerful Chrome Apps

Google has a lot of riding on Native Client, if it is a success, it could mean a new "era" of web apps that run as fast as native ones and are as cross-platform as anything else on the web. Native Client and the Pepper Plugin API are already quite powerful and are beginning to gain popularity.

Now, Google is making it easier for developers to write or convert apps to Native Client with a couple of new tools to simplify the workflow.

For one, there's now a Visual Studio add-in so you can write Native Client apps in your preferred IDE and have everything running smoothly, without having to hop from one app to the other, from the IDE to the command line and back.

"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," Google explained.

"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," it added.

Google also has a new Native Client debugger to make it easier to eliminate problems and spend more time actually writing code.

"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," Google said.

The debugger works from the command line and is available on any platform you prefer. It works with the Visual Studio add-in too, so you can get all of the functionality without having to fiddle with command line tools.

Both the debugger and the Visual Studio add-in are part of the Native Client SDK so all you need to do is get the latest version.