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Not the Author, but I can hazard a few guesses... Running this in the browser makes for a ridiculously easy setup. You can get up and running very quickly by j

Not the Author, but I can hazard a few guesses... Running this in the browser makes for a ridiculously easy setup. You can get up and running very quickly by just giving someone a URL (probably with a pre-unpacked image). Setting up a VM on the other hand, can be daunting if you don't already have the infrastructure setup. This might be a benefit of running this WASM VM vs a local VM. Second, you get the security benefit of running the code on your local computer as opposed to a remote VM. This may not be a big issue, but for some circumstances, it could be. Third, by running it locally as opposed to on a remote VM, might be more interactive, in that you don't have the round-trip time client -> server -> client. But this depends on how performant the WASM VM is. This isn't something you do for performance. The WASM VM seems "fast enough", but this isn't something that will be faster than many cloud-based VMs. For me, the major benefits would be setup/maintenance and security. Personally find this to be a pretty cool project, but I'm not sure of where I'd use it outside of teaching... but it's quite impressive. For the scrolling -- I found that once I scrolled to the bottom once, it auto-scrolled. But I was confused when I unpacked Python by this too.

pbronez 6y ago
> Running this in the browser makes for a ridiculously easy setup. You can get up and running very quickly by just giving someone a URL (probably with a pre-unpacked image)... I'm not sure of where I'd use it outside of teaching... but it's quite impressive. Teaching seems like a great use case. Maybe they'll use similar licensing as their Cheerp compiler [0] and provide a basic community tier. You could give students a foolproof (?) way to run a controlled set of applications locally without the confusion of setting up a local VM host or the expense of hosting virtual machines for the class. That assumes your students have decent computers. Actually, this would be a nice way to sideload real applications onto Chromebooks. Certainly more secure/accessible/maintainable than unlocking all the default protections and side-loading Linux first. [0] https://leaningtech.com/pages/cheerp.html https://leaningtech.com/pages/cheerp.html
- lights0123 6y ago
  The company has already donated their technology and time to emulating educational Java apps under WASM, which is helpful for school districts that are Chromebook-only.

pbronez 6y ago

> Running this in the browser makes for a ridiculously easy setup. You can get up and running very quickly by just giving someone a URL (probably with a pre-unpacked image)... I'm not sure of where I'd use it outside of teaching... but it's quite impressive. Teaching seems like a great use case. Maybe they'll use similar licensing as their Cheerp compiler [0] and provide a basic community tier. You could give students a foolproof (?) way to run a controlled set of applications locally without the confusion of setting up a local VM host or the expense of hosting virtual machines for the class. That assumes your students have decent computers. Actually, this would be a nice way to sideload real applications onto Chromebooks. Certainly more secure/accessible/maintainable than unlocking all the default protections and side-loading Linux first. [0] https://leaningtech.com/pages/cheerp.html https://leaningtech.com/pages/cheerp.html

lights0123 6y ago
The company has already donated their technology and time to emulating educational Java apps under WASM, which is helpful for school districts that are Chromebook-only.