Theseus: Translating Win32 to WASM

#1

Post by ingve » Mon, May 25, 2026, 7:26 AM UTC

Theseus: Translating Win32 to WASM
neugierig.org

Re: Theseus: Translating Win32 to WASM

#2

Post by mickael-kerjean » Wed, May 27, 2026, 4:17 PM UTC

It's refreshing to see those kind of projects coming back on HN. Pretty awesome to see your example (https://evmar.github.io/theseus/) fit in about 1MB when a lot of those wasm projects can be super heavy (like libreoffice which is 50MB after brotli compression)

Re: Theseus: Translating Win32 to WASM

#3

Post by valorzard » Wed, May 27, 2026, 4:27 PM UTC

I also tried doing multithreaded wasm in Rust, and I got some weiiiiird errors. Definitely not stable yet.

Re: Theseus: Translating Win32 to WASM

#4

Post by sedimannapoleon » Wed, May 27, 2026, 4:31 PM UTC

valorzard wrote: post #3

I also tried doing multithreaded wasm in Rust, and I got some weiiiiird errors. Definitely not stable yet.

[dead]

Re: Theseus: Translating Win32 to WASM

#5

Post by Aurornis » Wed, May 27, 2026, 4:42 PM UTC

Seeing minesweeper recompiled to run in the browser is awesome.

The pain points about threading in the browser and debugging wasm are the two problems I ran into on another project. I hope we can get some improvements in both areas because wasm would be a lot easier to work with if developers didn't have to fight both of those topics.

Re: Theseus: Translating Win32 to WASM

#6

Post by theanonymousone » Wed, May 27, 2026, 4:49 PM UTC

This is a big deal when/if it's working, to me at least. Where can I contribute?

Re: Theseus: Translating Win32 to WASM

#7

Post by gigel82 » Wed, May 27, 2026, 5:12 PM UTC

An interesting learning project, but not actually usable.

https://github.com/danoon2/Boxedwine looks interesting in this space, but unfortunately it can't really run anything remotely modern in practice (though if you're looking at 20th century Windows software it will likely be capable of running it).

Re: Theseus: Translating Win32 to WASM

#8

Post by hardwaresofton » Wed, May 27, 2026, 5:31 PM UTC

If you’re poking around WASM consider falling down the Component Model rabbit hole:

https://github.com/WebAssembly/component-model/blob/main/des...

Threading is actively being worked on right now (to be released in 0.3.x, soon), and some changes just made their way into LLVM as well:

https://github.com/llvm/llvm-project/pull/175800

Re: Theseus: Translating Win32 to WASM

#9

Post by arka2147483647 » Wed, May 27, 2026, 5:32 PM UTC

I miss the days when this would just have been named win2wasm.

These branded projects become difficult to remember when everything has a random non-mnemonic name.

Re: Theseus: Translating Win32 to WASM

#10

Post by Findecanor » Wed, May 27, 2026, 5:42 PM UTC

When I clicked, I thought this was going to be about the Theseus operating system [0]. Running win32 programs on it would have been ... interesting.

It too uses WASM, but for running non-Rust programs in sandboxes. Everything else is Rust. Hmm.. Last updated in 2024 though.

0: https://github.com/theseus-os/Theseus