Jslinux (2018) | Hacker News Reader

Jslinux (2018)

bellard.org

212 pointspmoriarty28 comments

2015: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10494831

2013: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5400185

2011: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2572915

Discussed at the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2555349

(Edit: these links are just for curious readers, who often like to look at past discussions. As HN's FAQ says, reposts are fine after a year or so: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html)

I did something similar back when NaCl wasn't dead, by running the full qemu (bellards other project) in Chrome. Here's a Screencast (8MB) of it booting Kolibri OS. Needless to say it was slow, but that's mainly down to not having done any optimizations.

https://vod-edge.turbo.run/Halite%20Origins.mp4

Fabrice Bellard continues to astound. What an absolute legend. If I were 1/100th as productive as him, I'd die happy.

https://smartbear.com/blog/test-and-monitor/fabrice-bellard-...

Some info here

He isn't active on HN :)

Possibly a contribution as to why he's so productive.

His work is absolutely astounding. I want to know what he eats, how long he sleeps, etc. :)

Now run it in https://bellard.org/quickjs

And run it in a VM in https://bellard.org/qemu

And load it over the cell network with https://bellard.org/lte/

Now I'd want some version of NodeJS that runs on this and without V8 :)

You can build it! Although you'd be missing out on V8. V8 is incredible. QuickJS isn't anywhere near as performant.

That's not to say that QuickJS isn't incredible. I never dreamed it would be possible to compile js interop with C into a stand-alone binary. That's freakin awesome.

Fabrice Bellard is one of very few pure geniuses that represent the best in software development. Hats off everyone.

Gary Bernhardt prophecy from his The Birth and Death of JavaScript[0] is coming true.

[0] https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/the-birth-and-death...

JSLinux predates that talk by 3 years. Also the “prophecy” is a special case of Atwood’s law from 2007, where the “anything” is an operating system.

I wish I could download or at least install stuff from my computer on the JS version of windows 2000. I have a Visual Source Safe archive to open and I guess I'll have to open a VM but that would have been nice to be able to do it in browser.

Depending on the version, source safe should work in wine. I'm able to run the version included in VS6.

I loaded Windows 2000 in my phone’s browser and watched the battery percent remaining drop one percent every 15 seconds. That said, I’m running Windows 2000 on a phone browser, which is madness.

Anyone have tips on getting this working with custom images? I tried making my own with TinyEMU and this JsOnline script, but it would never load. Or any suggestions for another project that fits my use case? That is, presenting a very minimal, in browser only, FULL Linux command line, for training purpose. The image can't be client side, and it has to have all 'expected' functionality; IE, not just a simulator for certain commands/paths.

Alas, this is just a virtual machine, when the name would make me think this is the Linux kernel itself translated to JS for some exotic experiments.

I cannot help but to feel the "just" in "just a virtual machine" is unjustified as it's not super common programming exercise to get a virtual machine to run in a browser. Think I've only seen this being done with QEMU before (another Fabrice project).

I agree, VM in browser is quite exotic and cool; just Linux-in-JS felt even more so.

LKL.js: https://retrage.github.io/lkl-js/

Thank you! Now, only how to apply it is left...

Finally a Linux that doesn't come with vim!

I’m pretty sure this is an attempt at humour. But minimal installations of the major distros do not have vim, in face I think Ubuntu makes nano the default $EDITOR (but I am not 100% on that)

But nothing I’ve seen makes me believe that vim isn’t available for this “platform”, nor do I think it’s inherently harmful to have a 500KiB program unused on a drive. (As this statement implies).

Most (if not all) Linux distros come with a “vi” (mandated by Posix) which is a plain, basic, feature-starved build of vim. I believe Posix having included vi as a requirement contributed to the status of vi as the omnipresent text editor.

You're right, it does in fact come with 'vi' :-).

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