One of the early changes for the LLVM 22 compiler stack now in development is completing the removal of support for Google’s Native Client “NaCl”.
The Google Native Client sandboxing tech was interesting when first conceived, but WebAssembly (WASM) has been superior for years for running native code within web browsers. Google phased out its official Native Client support in 2022 while now in 2025 the LLVM compiler stack is removing its support for being able to build any new NaCl/PNaCl binaries.
This merge request is what does away with the Native Client support in LLVM. Originally that merge request was opened earlier in the year but Google had requested it be held off for a few months while they finished wiping out support code remnants from within Chromium. Flushing out the remaining Native Client bits happened in Chrome/Chromium 139 and opened the door now for the compiler support to be removed in LLVM 22.
That code is now merged and lightens the LLVM compiler by 2.5k+ lines of code.
