website VS v86

Also note that that webpage can be somewhat out of date; for instance, see here for some recent edits to it (e.g. features Node had implemented that were marked as unavailable): https://github.com/WebAssembly/website/commits/main/

I would also say that IF blazor worked on a browser plugin like silverlight did, today that's not the case it is built on the webassembly standard which and it is being adopted in the browsers which means once it gets on the web, it is unlikely to ever go out again. Even if Microsoft themselves leave Blazor today, it can still work, the burden of creating a fork and keeping blazor alive will certainly be big but someone will be able to do that, just like the open silver folks revived silverlight via wasm tech without any particular Microsoft involvement.

Moreover, Tsavo and Rutvik also highlighted some ongoing and upcoming improvements in Dart, such as the isomorphic capability, compiling to WebAssembly, and how it has allowed us to communicate with JavaScript code effectively.

WebAssemblyOpen external link (abbreviated as “Wasm”) is a binary format that many languages can be compiled to. This allows you to write Workers using programming language beyond JavaScript, such as Rust, C, C++, Go and more.

In this post, we'll write a server-side Javascript function and then build it into a WebAssembly binary using the open source Spin tool. Our code will be less than a dozen lines long in total, so this is a concise introduction to WebAssembly and serverless functions that won't require you to spend a lot of time figuring out a code sample.

You might've noticed the increasing chatter around WebAssembly (WASM) in the dev community. Its potential is vast, and we've found it invaluable in enhancing our open source project!

WebAssembly.org: nice collection of resouces.

It's a meh deal.

They should've stuck with "this is crossplatform bytecode for the web", and it would've flourished there. Instead, now it's "designed as a portable compilation target for programming languages, enabling deployment on the web for client and server applications." [1]

Servers! Applications! Tigers! Lions! Oh my!

And it's not particularly good, or effective, or performant at any of those.

[1] https://webassembly.org

Today, the idea of optional code-on-demand execution in Web sites, in most cases, is violated. W3C introduced Web Components to extend HTML tags but made it entirely dependable on JavaScript. All modern Client-Side libraries, like React.JS, Angular, Vue.JS, are built with JavaScript. Sun Microsystems introduced Java Applets based on JVM. Adobe presented Macromedia Flash with a browser extension. Microsft made it possible to run reduced .NET applications in a browser with the Silverlight extension and recently introduced Blazor, which compiles C# code to WebAssembly and executes it on the client side.

> As a thought experiment, we're almost there! We could technically have `win95.img + bochs86vm.wasm + autorun.inf + msword.exe` wrapped in a "browser evaluator"

I looked into this and... holy crap! We are there. Not for modern programs quite yet, sure, but this is amazing. You can use Windows 2000 from your browser.

https://copy.sh/v86/?profile=windows2000

I think you are looking for Shadow.

https://shadow.goose.icu

Or just the whole kitchen sink. Why not?

http://copy.sh/v86/?profile=windows98

Also: https://github.com/copy/v86 - more productized browser x86 runtime, used by eg https://github.com/snaplet/postgres-wasm

Wonder if you could put all those databases in a Linux image and boot it using v86 [0], eliminating the need for a server.

[0] https://github.com/copy/v86

Trying it out in https://copy.sh/v86/?profile=kolibrios , it's also clearly a love letter to Windows 95 in particular. That could be an unstated goal here, create a very particular PC experience under very particular constraints. I don't know anything about the creator but it's very possible that this kind of work was actually their career in the 90s.

It's incredible how much work was done. Maybe this should be an internet curiosity like how TempleOS has become, though Terry's personality was a unique factor.

hmm, why would people still use VMWare? Isn't vbox open source, or even things such as https://copy.sh/v86/ would do most virtualization trick now days?

Oh, there are more OSes one can use at the parent page:

https://copy.sh/v86/

My highlights:

- First version of Windows (1.01)

- SerenityOS <3

- and even ReactOS