apignotti

9 ms·

91.
by apignotti 2y ago
We envision virtualization of corporate internal apps to be of the most interesting markets in the short-medium term. CheerpJ has been very successful in this segment for quite some time already. CheerpX can be seen as an alternative to Cit
92.
by apignotti 2y ago
Hello again HN. Lead dev of WebVM and CTO of Leaning Technologies here. Happy to answer any question from the community.
93.
Show HN: Alpine Linux / Xorg / i3 running in the browser via WebAssembly(webvm.io)
2 points by apignotti 2y ago|0 comments
94.
by apignotti 2y ago
CheerpX uses SharedArrayBuffer, which is associated to threads, and can optionally use Branch Hinting if available. The latter is fully standardized, but not yet enabled by default in Chrome.
95.
by apignotti 2y ago
I cannot speak for other VMs, in the case of CheerpX there is nothing fundamental preventing emulation/JIT-ting of 64-bit platforms, but it is an inefficient choice due to the current limitations of Wasm, in particular on the front of
96.
by apignotti 2y ago
I am not sure what 'ads' you are referring to, we don't have ads anywhere on our websites and demos. Anyway, click on the "Apps" button on the top menu, then click on "Terminal". An xterm session will open
97.
by apignotti 2y ago
The promise of WebAssembly is bringing actual large scale applications to the browser. To be clear, it is possible to build large apps with technologies like TypeScript, with VSCode being probably the standard bearer of this approach, but a
98.
by apignotti 2y ago
Thanks for reporting this, the approach to keyboard input is quite convoluted to integrate mobile input well. No "keydown"/"keyup" events on mobile. Any specific key or character that is not working for you? Or this
99.
by apignotti 2y ago
The disk blocks are streamed on demand, so a connection is required. The virtual disk is quite large (1.5GB) which is necessary to run a full distro but makes pre-downloading for offline mode not possible. It _could_ work if you let your wo
100.
by apignotti 2y ago
What makes WebVM (and CheerpX, the underlying virtualization engine) different is the level of performance that we have achieved. Although CheerpX is not yet perfect and additional optimizations are required on its floating point and vector
101.
by apignotti 2y ago
I want to clarify that we are not officially collaborating with GOG at this time, although we would love to do so. We think CheerpX would be very useful in education, to provide ready-made environments for students that can be wiped out on
102.
by apignotti 2y ago
Performance is expected to be between 3x-10x slowdown depending on the workload, which for this class of systems is quite good. The gap, especially on the high end, will further shrink as the virtualization engine improves. Not all parts of
103.
by apignotti 2y ago
There are lots of use cases, these are the few we have identified so far, but there are certainly many more: * REPLs for any programming language (Python, ruby, nodejs) for trying out ideas or libraries without installing an environment or
104.
by apignotti 2y ago
Hello HN! Lead dev of WebVM and CTO of Leaning Technologies here. Happy to answer any question.
105.
by apignotti 2y ago
At the time of the comment the other entry was marked as duped as well
106.
by apignotti 2y ago
To clarify, this is _not_ a duplicate of past discussions. Support for a full graphical desktop was never available before and completely changes the capabilities of this technology.
107.
by apignotti 2y ago
The last time it was discussed it did not support graphical modes. The new version can boot a complete Alpine + Xorg + i3 environment. See here: https://webvm.io/alpine.html
108.
by apignotti 2y ago
No, the competition is explicitly based around CheerpX: an X86 virtualization technology built on top of WebAssembly
109.
by apignotti 2y ago
GCC? That's easy! :-) What about a complete system? https://webvm.io Shameless plug: we are hosting a WebVM Hackathon next week (11-14 October) over Discord. For more information: https://cheerpx.io/hackatho
110.
by apignotti 2y ago
I see the game was ported with the legacy CheerpJ 2.3 runtime. Consider upgrading to the new CheerpJ 3.0. Improving boot times has been one of our main goals and upgrading is very easy: https://cheerpj.com/docs/migratin
111.
by apignotti 2y ago
Lead dev of CheerpJ here, if you need support you can find us on Discord: https://discord.gg/X9ruPkchM5 Edit: Tool a quick look at the repo, if the game is a Java 8 Swing application (as it seems) then it will most likely w
112.
by apignotti 2y ago
X64 is not yet supported, but we got good results for x86 already: https://webvm.io
113.
WebAssembly Branch Hinting: From an idea to W3C standard(labs.leaningtech.com)
2 points by apignotti 2y ago|0 comments
114.
by apignotti 2y ago
Well, the environment itself is a container. Supporting Linux "namespaces" used to implement containers is also a possibility. As described in the project README we provide a GitHub Action workflow to convert Dockerfiles into boot
115.
by apignotti 2y ago
1. Support for traditional copy/paste shortcuts is problematic, since Ctrl-C is interpreted as the SIGINT signal. Copying via the mouse menu should work. Pasting is supported via Ctrl+Shift+V. 2. We had these reported from several user
116.
by apignotti 2y ago
Working offline is not truly possible since that would require downloading the full 2GB disk image, which is something that is deliberately avoided by the system architecture. State is already locally maintained via IndexedDB, no data is ev
117.
by apignotti 2y ago
All the components of the network stack are open source: namely the Tailscale go client and the lwip networking stack. Some (not fully trivial) glue code is also required, which is not currently published. We do plan to cleanup the stack an
118.
by apignotti 2y ago
(Same answer as a more deeply nested comment below) The technology is extremely flexibile, off the top of my head: * Education (Linux, Programming, Security, ...) * Live docs for arbitrary languages and binary libraries * Preservation of hi
119.
by apignotti 2y ago
The technology is extremely flexibile, off the top of my head: * Education (Linux, Programming, Security, ...) * Live docs for arbitrary languages and binary libraries * Preservation of historical software and games * Virtualization of lega
120.
by apignotti 2y ago
Yes, we are working on it right now. The immediate priority is booting a complete desktop environment. Next steps will include 3D graphics.

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