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Hello again HN. Lead dev of WebVM and CTO of Leaning Technologies here. Happy to answer any question from the community.

Sad to see Linux turning into a web app. I thought they'd be smart enough to avoid this sort of trend. Hope they continue to support the desktop version.

Cool, starting with this we might see Linux being implemented in Javascript. /joking

Very cool project, and great for many usecases. In absolute performance, I find it about 16x slower than CPU [1], but it'd still be super fast compared to the full Linux GUIs we were using comfortably in the 90s/2000s on slower CPUs. Might work for sandboxing user code as well.

[1]: My utterly naive benchmark completes in 9s - time seq 1 50000000 | wc -l

duplicate: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40940225

I think its cool but am I the only one that doesn't really think the web is a good platform for this? Like, VM stuff needs to be as close to bare metal as possible to be fast. There's special processor features that make virtualisation work well. It's amazingly efficient now. You can vastly over-allocate your hardware between VMs with good modern virtualisation software because they're so damn efficient that they only utilise CPU and memory when they need it. That means they're not just like allocated 4 GBs if you allocate 4 GB to the VM.

All these little optimisations... just aren't going to work well in a browser. I mean, I can already see that alpine (an extremely lightweight VM that I've had boot instantly with vagrant and other such stuff) is slow here. It's a cool hack. I just prefer things to be practical...

The networking workaround is clever, but still too complex for the casual user. My dream of safe, easy, local apps, with networking and persistent cloud storage is still on hold.

Networking over websockets with tailscale is a nice touch.

Note this repository doesn't include source for CheerpX, which is the main component of WebVM.

/? "webvm" jupyter: https://www.google.com/search?q=%22webvm%22+jupyter

- "Is WebVM a potential solution to "JupyterLite doesn't have a bash/zsh shell"?" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30167403#30168491 :

- [ ] "ENH: Terminal and Shell: BusyBox, bash/zsh, git; WebVM," https://github.com/jupyterlite/jupyterlite/issues/949

And then now WASM containers in the browser FWIU

Some other VMs that run in browser

https://copy.sh/v86/

https://bellard.org/jslinux/

https://jamesfriend.com.au/pce-js/ (https://github.com/jsdf/pce)

https://www.pcjs.org/ (lots of hardware and OSes) (https://github.com/jeffpar/pcjs)

https://infinitemac.org/ (https://blog.persistent.info/2023/03/infinitemac-dot-org.htm...)

https://jamesfriend.com.au/projects/basiliskii/BasiliskII-wo...

https://jamesfriend.com.au/pce-js/pce-js-apps/

Previous discussion with 632 points: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40940225

Student here, and this has to be the most satisfying 20 minutes I spent cloning a GitHub repo in a while.

Here are a few things I encountered which might probably help others:

    # Version mismatch: 
    The install version of node.js I had (v12.22.9) was too old to meet the project's requirements (>= 18.13). 

To fix that, I used nvm to install the right Node.js version (>18.0)

    # Version check before install: Used the following to check version to verify before proceeding ahead with building it:
    node -v
    npm -v

It ran successfully, and I've been playing around with built-in Python3 and C scripts and pushed the modified repo to my personal GitHub. Thank you, dev!

Is there a server if you want to run your own WebSockets as a transport layer?

Remember when the web was just for displaying documents? Yeah, me neither

It also supports Tailscale (or the other way around). If you use SSH from Tailscale Admin it’s actually WebVM you see: https://labs.leaningtech.com/blog/webvm-virtual-machine-with...

Who needs this in the browser and for what purpose?

Can I run WebVM inside WebVM?

Imagine the performance boost if you removed the browser

Cool, starting with this we might see Linux being implemented in Javascript.