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Comment by MrQuincle | Hacker News Reader

Wow, looks like a big deal. I've been reading through https://github.com/plasma-umass/browsix/blob/master/doc/repo... which is a really nice article, but I'd recommend you to tell a bit more on what this level of indirection brings.

You mention Bluetooth for example in the beginning which is an example of hardware that is yet not supported from the browser.

Applications beyond what can currently be done in a UNIX shell would be good. You already have thought long about it. I feel you can tell us much more about possibilities!!!

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Hi, one of the authors here. Thanks!

We have a tech report, that has more details on what we are aiming for here: https://web.cs.umass.edu/publication/details.php?id=2414

As another example of what we can do with real Unix abstractions in the browser, we have : https://meme.bpowers.net/

Which runs a standard Go HTTP server in a web worker, and instead of doing XMLHttpRequests to a remote service, can route those requests to the in-browser HTTP server! In this case it is about 10x slower, but I think that is an artifact of the GopherJS compiler I have yet to work out.

    > You mention Bluetooth for example in the beginning which
    > is an example of hardware that is yet not supported from
    > the browser.

In what way? There's Cordova/PhoneGap, W3C Web Bluetooth; JS libraries like noble and bleat.

I'm not the author, sorry. Just spotted this on the Google Summer of Code projects list. Read through the paper too, quite creative stuff. I suppose Bluetooth was just an example as the project is still kind of proof of concept at present.

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