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JSLinux
- cardiffspaceman 1y agoThe TEMU column is not shopping links.
- skerit 1y agoI can't seem to get the Linux VMs running (I'm just getting a CORS error when it tries to fetch the little text file at `https://vfsync.org/u/os/buildroot-riscv64/head https://vfsync.org/u/os/buildroot-riscv64/head` for example), but the Windows 2000 one does work. Quite smoothly even.
- dvdkon 1y agoIt only allows bellard.org, not www.bellard.org. Changing the domain loads the same webpage, but with CORS working as intended.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- tombert 1y agoFabrice is amazing. The amount of stuff this guy has built is utterly incredible. If I built any one of the things he's built (ffmpeg, qemu, tinyc) I would never stop bragging about it. Instead, he just keeps hacking on other cool stuff.
- wruza 1y agoYeah why don't we learn what he wants and just give it to him, in return he'll properly rewrite all the broken shit we have. Phones, operating systems, desktop environments, countries, appstores, etc.
- ForOldHack 1y agoThis is literally a brilliant idea. This guy needs a Macarthur grant now. Even if he rewrites half of all the broken shit we have, (and takes all of 20 years to do it) the world will be a better place. Except for _ which will always be a ___ hole.
- ForOldHack 1y agoRedmond. This guy should have had a Macarthur grant a decade ago. The list of brilliant stuff he has done is longer than my arm, and I have long arms.
- melvinroest 1y agoJust writing a comment here to support this idea as much as I can on HN. I also upvoted all the comments mentioning that he should have a grant. In my opinion, he really should have.
- throwaway2037 1y agoAs I understand, he was born in France, so probably a French national. According to Wiki (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MacArthur_Fellows_Program https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MacArthur_Fellows_Program), he needs to be a citizen or resident of the US to qualify. Bummer. Better idea: Get some crypto-bros to donate 5-10B USD in Bitcoin into a foundation so we can create the international version.
- keepamovin 1y agoThere's enough money on HN (the demographics) that some wealthy benefactors in a WhatsApp group could just donate it to him. No excuses, get behind ICs. Of course, back in Renaissance days it was the ICs/artists job to court benefactors -- though sometimes they did approach unsolicited. Maybe he already has patronage but he doesn't want to flash it around...
- underdeserver 1y agoWait, countries?
- 6510 1y agoA lot of countries picked the low hanging fruit but the trees are very tall. When making an application one should look from the user perspective. Say you want to start a business. You edit the profile page, check the entrepreneur box, it goes into a kind of supper pursuit mode with menus folding out, you fill out the company name, >>click<< the button to generate a bank number, a tax number, a registration number, a phone number, a domain name, hosting, etc If you sell something it goes into the bank account and sales tax or vat is subtracted. You press the add employee button, pick a standard contract and fill out the hours per week. Salaries will come out of your government bank account with income tax subtracted automatically. The generated website lists your products and services and is aggregated into a complete country-wide db with everything in it and a glorious search interface. Investors can log in on the website automatically. Upload the business plan if you have one so that AI can give you free money. Real estate listings pop up, the right machines to buy, office equipment, potential employees... An agenda is generated with a list of people the AI thinks you should be talking to. Check the box to plan the appointments. Add music, sound effects and animations to everything as if we are 5 years old.
- yason 1y agoI can imagine he wouldn't be interested in any of that. The joy of hacking only emerges when there are no external demands. That's why work sucks and you need to pay people to work for your demands.
- IggleSniggle 1y agoYup. I can't even enjoy hacking if the taskmaster is MYSELF
- phanimahesh 1y agoYes! I'm looking for ways to trick myself or otherwise convince myself to make progress on any of the bazillion totally awesome ideas I keep accumulating. Or one of the many projects I start and abandon midway
- throwaway889900 1y agoSounds like you need an Alex Horne.
- benterix 1y ago> in return he'll properly rewrite all the broken shit we have Probably that's exactly what he doesn't want.
- danielEM 1y ago100% agree, would like to meet that guy one day
- ForOldHack 1y agoPlease - anyone - announce a talk he is going to give. I would listen to him. I just heard Vint Cerf speak on martian probe networking.
- NetOpWibby 1y agoI know what I’m listening to when I wake up
- dingdingdang 1y agoI know for a fact that ppl are serious on hn when they post in their sleep without any fanfare whatsoever
- p0w3n3d 1y agoI love this guy. Half of the world's android development has been made easier due to his courtesy, and it's getting more (his qemu is ubiquitous)
- xorcist 1y agoAlso the same person who wrote LZEXE, which might be familiar to people who used DOS.
- jorvi 1y agoDon't forget VLC! Probably his most well-known project.
- jebarker 1y agoI'd love to know how he chooses what to work on. I wonder if he just follows his interest?
- rmac 1y agoKohei Tokunaga has the next generation of this https://ktock.github.io/container2wasm-demo/ https://ktock.github.io/container2wasm-demo/ with emscripten Browser networking via fetch, or a Posix compat websocket proxy https://ktock.github.io/container2wasm-demo/amd64-debian-wasi.html https://ktock.github.io/container2wasm-demo/amd64-debian-was...
- maxloh 1y agoFun fact: it is based on TinyEMU too. https://github.com/container2wasm/container2wasm?tab=readme-ov-file#how-does-it-work https://github.com/container2wasm/container2wasm?tab=readme-...
- roschdal 1y agoJSLinux is too slow to be used for anything. Where is the complete source code for this?
- ofrzeta 1y agoOn the TinyEMU page? https://bellard.org/tinyemu/ https://bellard.org/tinyemu/
- roschdal 1y agoWhere can I find the source code and instructions about how to make the Linux distro which runs here?
- jeroenhd 1y agoJSLinux runs any disk image reachable over the network. You can find the Alpine sources over at https://github.com/alpinelinux https://github.com/alpinelinux. The Fedora sources are over at https://src.fedoraproject.org/ https://src.fedoraproject.org/. I don't think the script to package the pre-built images is documented somewhere, but it's all standard Linux you can install yourself in a virtual machine if you want. The Windows 2000 sources are probably leaked somewhere on Github, or you could apply for a job with Microsoft maybe. I managed to get ReactOS to boot in JSLinux once by installing it into a standard QEMU image and splitting the image into chunks as required by the emulator code. You need quite a fast CPU to run a full, modern OS at acceptable speeds, though.
- jgtrosh 1y agoI find it perfect for technical interviews over screen sharing, since we test for some basic degree of ease on remote linux systems.
- s-macke 1y agoThis emulator does basically the same but is much more speed optimized. It uses the OpenRISC architecture and even has networking. For what do you want to use such an emulator? [0] https://github.com/s-macke/jor1k https://github.com/s-macke/jor1k
- loeg 1y agoAny particular reason we want to revisit this (2018) now? https://hn.algolia.com/?q=jslinux https://hn.algolia.com/?q=jslinux
- skrebbel 1y agoProbably because it's super cool
- someoneontenet 1y agoMy dream is have a in browser nixos vm on wasm. If I could have a bare vm, I can bootstrap it easily with a nixos config. From there I can start thinking about running web services in browser tabs instead of physical hardware.
- londons_explore 1y agoPretty sure this is possible already... What's stopping you?
- someoneontenet 1y agoI’ve tried to set this up and get a little bogged down on some of the finer points of compiling nixos to wasm. It’s not very straightforward unfortunately :/
- pveierland 1y agoConsidering the extremes of prolific developers gives interesting contrast to dogmas such as "functions/files should never be above x lines", where `quickjs.c` is 50k lines and has functions that are hundreds of lines long: https://github.com/bellard/quickjs/blob/master/quickjs.c https://github.com/bellard/quickjs/blob/master/quickjs.c (Obviously different approaches suits different circumstances.)
- lifthrasiir 1y agoThe answer is simple: Bellard can recall all 50K lines of context, while most can't. I too happen to have a larger working memory and only later realized that my threshold for files and functions is way higher than most others. The dogma is only required when the file is to be read and written by multiple people.
- spookie 1y agotbh working on one file is most often much more ergonomic for me. Depends entirely on the sw architecture of course.
- p0w3n3d 1y agoTbh I've lived already through at least three different dogmas contradicting each other. Those are sometimes behaving like a fashion
- lifthrasiir 1y agoI would say that dogmas are normally born out of necessity before they become dogmatic, so it is beneficial to analyze and extract core values out of dogmas instead of entirely ignoring them. In this particular case we can conclude that the threshold should be determined per team, because some team may have a member whose working memory is exceptionally smaller than the average. (Ultimately this shouldn't surprise anyone because the coding convention has to be per team anyway.)
- 1y ago
- tombl 1y agoFabrice does a great job at building these self-contained pieces of software which often grow to have lives of their own. As a lesser known example, JSLinux's terminal emulator was forked a few times and is now known as xterm.js, which has become the predominant web embeddable terminal emulator. This all comes full circle, because now I'm building a true successor to JSLinux that's way faster because I've natively compiled the kernel/userspace to wasm, and of course I'm using xterm.js for the terminal emulation. If you like buggy demos that probably shouldn't be shared yet, you should check out https://linux.tombl.dev https://linux.tombl.dev, but note that it's currently just a busybox shell and nothing else, so I hope you're good with `echo *` instead of `ls`.
- fsiefken 1y agoAwesome, I suppose it's more energy efficient then jslinux and can be run on iOS, it might be a good alternative for A-Shell or iSH. I tried it on my a MacBook, but the keyboard input doesn't register.
- agumonkey 1y agois there any command working ? ps, cat, vi, ed .. they all crash (I don't know enough about embedding busybox to know what to do)
- ohc 1y agoYou can hit Tab twice to get a list of commands that are available
- DyslexicAtheist 1y agofor now I get a kernel panic due to NoScript. But does this support recursion? I'd like to run JSLinux in my browser and then point its Browser to https://www.bellard.org/jslinux/ https://www.bellard.org/jslinux/ which then starts another JSLinux which opens the browser on JSLinux which ... JSLinux isn't another Linux but a landmark of postmodern philosophy, and OP most def forgot to credit Baudrillard. crazy cool.
- jeroenhd 1y agoIf you host your own OS image that auto-starts a browser that runs JSLinux and a config file like https://www.bellard.org/jslinux/alpine-x86.cfg https://www.bellard.org/jslinux/alpine-x86.cfg, you can create such a link yourself. CORS may be your biggest enemy, there's no reason JSLinux can't do what you're proposing (albeit extremely slowly).
- dxroshan 1y agoFabrice is an amazing programmer, and does cool things. He is an inspiration to us all.
- ridruejo 1y agoJSLinux was our inspiration for creating Endor (https://endor.dev https://endor.dev) and his qemu work is also powering a lot of other Wasm-related browser projects
- pveierland 1y agoAre there any open details on how the VM / container / WASM-native approaches are implemented?
- ridruejo 1y agoNot right now, we should write a blog post, but we are still behind on the docs. VM and containers use V86, while wasm-native are generated using Emscripten.
- pveierland 1y agoCool, thanks for the answer - Would make for an interesting read!
- NetOpWibby 1y agoI just spent an hour playing Solitaire in Windows 2000
- throwaway2037 1y agoDoes anyone know how Fabrice Bellard gets paid? This guy's output of open source project is simply stunning. Is there anyone in his class? It is hard to compare. I assume that someone like VMWare would try to hire him, or Google to work on video codecs, V8, Chromium rendering, or ffmpeg.
- throwaway2037 1y agoOk, it looks like he runs his own company: https://www.amarisoft.com/company/about-us https://www.amarisoft.com/company/about-us
- keepamovin 1y agoI have to say there are some extremely talented, creative and productive "software artists" or ICs coming out of France. Not sure if that's a French thing (the Ecoles or whatever) or something else, but it's noticable.
- justin66 1y agoCan you name some that invite comparison with FB?
- keepamovin 1y agoI'd do less comparison and more recognition. Some of these are kind of old or from the past and I'm no expert and the list is very incomplete but: Jean Ichbiah - big contributor to Ada Alain Colmerauer - creator of Prolog Jean-Marie Hullot - iCal, iSync, NeXTSTEP GUI builder, CTO of Applications at Apple in early 2000s Philippe Kahn - founder of Borland, inventor of first camera-phone Olivier Fourdan - creator of Xfce, big contributor to Wayland
- wavemode 1y agoLaurent Gomila - creator of SFML Jean-Baptiste Kempf - creator of VLC
- _hyn3 1y agoWilly Tarreau - creator of HA Proxy
- fuzztester 1y agoSome of the people at INRIA who created Caml and OCaml. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/OCaml https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/OCaml Bertrand Meyer, creator of Eiffel. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eiffel_(programming_language) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eiffel_(programming_language...
- justin66 1y ago> I'd do less comparison and more recognition. Not to be overly snarky, but it's a good thing, since none of those people's output is comparable to FB's. The thought there might be another programmer like him was an interesting one to entertain...
- smusamashah 1y agoThere aren't many VMs that can run in browser https://copy.sh/v86/ https://copy.sh/v86/ https://webvm.io/ https://webvm.io/ https://bellard.org/jslinux/ https://bellard.org/jslinux/ https://jamesfriend.com.au/pce-js/ https://jamesfriend.com.au/pce-js/ (https://github.com/jsdf/pce https://github.com/jsdf/pce) https://www.pcjs.org/ https://www.pcjs.org/ (lots of hardware and OSes) (https://github.com/jeffpar/pcjs https://github.com/jeffpar/pcjs) Mac OS https://infinitemac.org/ https://infinitemac.org/ (https://blog.persistent.info/2023/03/infinitemac-dot-org.html https://blog.persistent.info/2023/03/infinitemac-dot-org.htm...) https://jamesfriend.com.au/projects/basiliskii/BasiliskII-worker.html https://jamesfriend.com.au/projects/basiliskii/BasiliskII-wo... https://jamesfriend.com.au/pce-js/pce-js-apps/ https://jamesfriend.com.au/pce-js/pce-js-apps/
- DrNosferatu 1y agoIs this list just 16bit?
- lxgr 1y agoAt least v86 supports 32 bit x86 OSes too.
- DrNosferatu 1y agohttps://taws.ch/ https://taws.ch/ (Amiga OS) https://amiga.oszx.co/ https://amiga.oszx.co/ https://www.file-hunter.com/AMIGA/ https://www.file-hunter.com/AMIGA/ https://www.file-hunter.com/MSX/ https://www.file-hunter.com/MSX/ (MSX! via WebMSX)
- smusamashah 1y agoIs the UI of OS an emulation? First link says it's a simulation not an emulator.
- DrNosferatu 1y agoBut very useful nevertheless - and there’s full Amiga emulation in the other links.
- DrNosferatu 1y ago- What about a WASM flavor of this, Fabrice? ;)
- haunter 1y agoNot by him but it does exist https://ktock.github.io/container2wasm-demo/ https://ktock.github.io/container2wasm-demo/
- Maksadbek 1y agoFabrice Bellard is a real coding monster!
- sylware 1y agoGood. Only wayland RISC-V 64bits binaries from now on, even for the web. We don't need anything else anymore.
- patwolf 1y agoI played around in Windows 2000 for the first time in 20 years. I know nostalgia can be blinding, but I would go back to that UI in a heartbeat. The uncluttered taskbar, the simple start menu that isn't full of useless recommendations and ads—such a joy!
- Tepix 1y agoRelated: "Windows 2000 Server named peak Microsoft. Readers say it's all been downhill since Clippy" https://www.theregister.com/2025/04/11/windows_2000_best_microsoft/ https://www.theregister.com/2025/04/11/windows_2000_best_mic... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43653421 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43653421
- edoceo 1y agoThe reason I've been on Xfce since at least 2010, it still works the same. I feel like open-source inherently has alignment with users and blockers to enshitification
- pengaru 1y agoIt helps but is no panacea: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/09/ubuntu-bakes-amazon-search-results-into-os-to-raise-cash/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/09/ubunt...
- steeleduncan 1y agoI don't remotely want to use Windows 2000 again, but it is interesting to see a version of Windows where the UI was consistent. Currently it is a mishmash of four generations of GUI toolkits, some UI is in one style, some UI is another, etc, etc
- shepherdjerred 1y agoI've found Windows 11 to actually look quite consistent/good -- nearly as good as macOS.
- 1y ago
- a3f 1y agoWe are using JSLinux over at https://barebox.org/webdemo https://barebox.org/webdemo to let potential users see the conveniences of the bootloader's shell without having to flash it to actual hardware. I am glad to see all the forks mentioned here, need to see which one runs bareDOOM best and if any have working sound perhaps..
- a3f 1y agohttps://barebox.org/demo https://barebox.org/demo being the correct link..
- slt2021 1y agoFabrice Bellard is the Chuck Norris of software engineering
- gamebak 1y agoThis is amazing! But beware admin, it seems that the RAM can be hijacked and increased...
- slackfan 1y agoAh, the destroy all software talk is coming true!
- appleaday1 1y agoI use ffmpeg to create transcript with a popular video sharing site.