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Comment by batgaijin | Hacker News Reader

I was hoping it was a finished version of http://bellard.org/jslinux/

I was hoping it used http://www.paulgraham.com/arc.html

Same expectation here. Deploying a customized VM to the browser (with networking included) will be very interesting.

I am not sure about the real use cases. For learning development will be useful since you don't need to do a more complex interaction between the browser and your server.

Unfortunately, full networking capability as it exists in a typical virtual machine (like Virtualbox), will not be possible in pure javascript. Security features of the browser like the same origin policy restrict this from being possible. Even if you were to use some of the exceptions to the same origin policy, you will be limited to sending HTTP requests. There is no way to send a UDP packet from javascript for example. Of course you can create browser extensions which expose these utilities, but then you're taking the easy way out :)

Would be neat for a project like this to go open source and accept community submissions. Not sure why the author of jsLinux didn't go that route.

Fabrice Bellard is the author of qemu and ffmpeg (among other things), so it is likely he is aware of the benefits of open source and it is a conscious decision (maybe there is interest from someone with relatively deep pockets, or maybe he considers it too hacky?) Don't want to speak for him here though.

I do wonder how qemu compiled via emscripten would compare though...

Fabrice Bellard is the Chuck Norris of all hackers..

its a waste of time trying to figure out what his superior mind could be thinking :)

Unbelievable. I tried, echo, ls, find, grep, top, ping, whoami, ps, wget, vi, emacs. Everything is there. All in my browser in Javascript? This is fucking cool. I would love a complete vim in javascript that I can use to replace textareas. This would make it possible to simply use the vim.

http://codemirror.net/

I am not a vim user, but I guess this gets close:

http://codemirror.net/demo/vim.html

Interesting! Thanks, will look into it!

It's the best attempt I've seen so far, but still it's very close from _the real Vim_.

See this: http://haldean.org/docstore/?vim-problems .

The real wtf is installing tcc and running hello-world with a shebang...

Just give me one more month, I'm almost there ...

anybody just typed:

$ ls

$ gcc hello.c -o hello

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