webvm VS postgres-wasm

Shameless self-promotion: https://webvm.io

Powered by a x86->Wasm JIT. Technical writeup: https://labs.leaningtech.com/blog/webvm-server-less-x86-virt...

Developer here. CheerpX for Flash runs the Pepper API version of Flash, and you're correct about the license. However, we don't do full Linux emulation just to run Flash - we emulate PPAPI and run the Flash player in an x86 JIT (CheerpX).

Yuri talks about CXFF's architecture here:

https://youtu.be/7JUs4c99-mo?t=1045

...but if you wanted full Linux system emulation, we got it! https://webvm.io

webvm has Tailscale sockets-over-WebSockets for networking: https://github.com/leaningtech/webvm

https://webvm.io/ supports WebVM runs x86 binaries in WASM on any browser w/ ("CheerpX includes an x86-to-WebAssembly JIT compiler, a virtual block-based file system, and a Linux syscall emulator") and for external sockets there's Tailscale networking.

IIUC that means an SSH client in a WebVM can connect to a (tailscale (wg)) VPN mesh

lets pre-load it into a https://github.com/leaningtech/webvm/blob/main/dockerfiles/debian_mini

Just to show how complex these can get look at this https://webvm.io/

Funnily enough, I believe that's completely achievable with enough time spent on it (probably a few weeks of an engineer working full time).

We have technology like WebVM [1] (from leaningtech / CheerP) or Copy86 [2] that already allows x86 machine code execution/emulation on the web. If you add an OCI client layer on top that is executable in the browser, it should be possible to run Docker containers in the browser.

[1] https://webvm.io/

[2] https://copy.sh/v86/

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

> forcing SQLite

It might be the case that it's running SQLite via wasm. If so, then other database engines would need to be runnable in a browser too.

PostgreSQL has been shown to work in the browser (eg https://www.crunchydata.com/blog/learn-postgres-at-the-playg..., and also https://github.com/snaplet/postgres-wasm), so that might be an option.

Not sure about others.

Thanks, I've been looking at WASM, for ex https://github.com/snaplet/postgres-wasm/tree/main/packages/... , it would certainly simplify everything to "download a fat file".

Hey! Peter from Snaplet here. This is really exciting stuff. We created the OSS postgres-wasm (https://github.com/snaplet/postgres-wasm) example a few weeks ago. An idea I'm playing around with is something like:

  1. Visit https://postgresql.com/try?version=14.x

Other in-memory alternatives for PostgreSQL embedded-postgres (I haven't tried it yet) postgres-wasm (currently it only runs in the browser).

"/s" is obsolete as of now: https://github.com/snaplet/postgres-wasm I'm so sorry

Today we're open sourcing postgres-wasm with our friends at Snaplet.

Peter from Snaplet here. A month ago I saw the CrunchyData post and wanted to play around with the code that made it happen, it wasn't OSS so I asked for help:

> If anyone out there wants to work on an open source version of this full-time please reach out to me. [0]

Paul reached out and we started working on it almost immediately. Check out the repo here: https://github.com/snaplet/postgres-wasm

We have a blog post about some of the interesting technical challenges that we faced whilst building this: https://www.snaplet.dev/post/postgresql-in-the-browser

Like most things, this is built on-top of the amazing open-source projects that made this possible, but special mention goes to v86.js and buildroot. We just glued it together.

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[0] Request for collaboration: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32500526