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Comment by jauntywundrkind | Hacker News Reader

"give a man an inch and they'll take a mile" and what not, but,

I wonder how hard this would be to port to Hoot, a web assembly/wasm-ified Guile Scheme. https://spritely.institute/hoot/

It would be neat to have some real management APIs for the things running on a page, to be able to manage long running processes & workers.

A bit more niche than for general webapps, but systemgo comes to mind; a re-impl of some of systemd in go, specifically designed to be run on the web in Browsix. https://github.com/plasma-umass/systemgo

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Amusingly enough, the main direction Shepherd is exploring right now is integrating Spritely Goblins (the folks that are also writing Hoot), so that it would have a distributed, capability-based process manager. I wouldn't say running Shepherd with Hoot is a direct goal of this, but it may fall out naturally from it.

Shepherd may actually work in Hoot right now -- I know the Spritely team were working on getting Guile's fibers library to work in WASM, and that's probably the biggest lift.

It may be possible to get Shepherd to work with Hoot eventually! I'm not sure what on earth it would mean though. What daemons would you manage in the browser? But it's indeed a fun idea!

If you could configure a fleet of machines from a browser window, over the network; that would be pretty cool. No clue how that would work in practice here though.

Since everything would be speaking OCapN you could use the browser interface as a convenient command center. This idea is becoming quite appealing to me actually... would be cool to have a little dashboard showing the health of my servers and be able to restart a failed service if I needed to.

Wow, that's a very fun reply! Nice.

Fingers crossed that the Stack Switching spec gets adopted & serves Guile Hoot's needs for fibers. https://github.com/WebAssembly/stack-switching

Stack switching in wasm would be great (as long as they aren't nerfed which they might be!) but note that Hoot has fibers right now: https://gitlab.com/spritely/guile-hoot/-/tree/main/lib/fiber...

> I wonder how hard this would be to port to Hoot

It would be interesting, though I don't know if it would make sense. In any case, the way to do it would be to extract all the code that does POSIX things into an abstraction layer. Shepherd is built on the Fibers async system which Hoot supports so that part shouldn't be an issue.

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