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Comment by smusamashah | Hacker News Reader

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smusamashah·

There are a few others

VMs

https://copy.sh/v86/

https://bellard.org/jslinux/

https://jamesfriend.com.au/pce-js/ (https://github.com/jsdf/pce)

https://www.pcjs.org/ (lots of hardware and OSes) (https://github.com/jeffpar/pcjs)

Mac OS

https://infinitemac.org/ (https://blog.persistent.info/2023/03/infinitemac-dot-org.htm...)

https://jamesfriend.com.au/projects/basiliskii/BasiliskII-wo...

https://jamesfriend.com.au/pce-js/pce-js-apps/

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These are full system emulators, this is more a compatibility layer ("Linux syscall emulator") for emulated userland binaries. I.e. a bit higher level and a bit more usable/flexible as a result.

I think it's also much faster in practice

I'm curious, but what's the catch?

The obvious one is that it is userland-only, you don't get to play around with custom kernels being emulated on the hardware layer.

Beyond the userland-only limitation, syscall emulation is probably incomplete at best[0], and likely doesn't pass the Linux test suite for the subset of calls that are supported.

To get a flavor of the work required when emulating the kernel, you can read up on the work it took Windows developers to emulate Linux syscalls on top of the NT kernel for WSL 1 here: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/archive/blogs/wsl/wsl-syst...

WSL devs eventually abandoned that effort in favor of running the actual kernel in a VM -- that's how WSL 2 is implemented.

[0] I'd be surprised if sys_fork actually forks the process using a web worker, for example.

This definitely supports fork; you can see that bash works in it.

It's a commercial project and not open-source https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40944412

It doesn't seem so at all from what I've tried.

What have you tried?

On webvm.io

> $ time python3 -c "max(range(10**7))"

real 0m1.558s

On https://copy.sh/v86/?profile=archlinux

> # time python3 -c "max(range(10**7))"

real 0m5.283s

https://exaequos.com

Where do the most advanced minecraft computers[1] land on the scale of sophistication compared to all these + WebVM?

[1] https://duckduckgo.com/?q=comptuers+built+in+minecraft

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