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Webvm: Virtual Machine for the Web

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Re: Webvm: Virtual Machine for the Web

#22

Post by doctorpangloss »

apignotti wrote: post #20

Hello again HN. Lead dev of WebVM and CTO of Leaning Technologies here. Happy to answer any question from the community.

I've heard about CheerpJ and your Flash solution too. You guys pump out a lot of pretty sophisticated web middlewares. Supposing people were fully aware of your technology, which application do you think would have the highest yield to be ported to your portfolio of middlewares?

Re: Webvm: Virtual Machine for the Web

#23

Post by jeswin »

Very cool project, and great for many usecases. In absolute performance, I find it about 16x slower than CPU [1], but it'd still be super fast compared to the full Linux GUIs we were using comfortably in the 90s/2000s on slower CPUs. Might work for sandboxing user code as well.

[1]: My utterly naive benchmark completes in 9s - time seq 1 50000000 | wc -l

Re: Webvm: Virtual Machine for the Web

#24

Post by apignotti »

doctorpangloss wrote: post #22
apignotti wrote: post #20

Hello again HN. Lead dev of WebVM and CTO of Leaning Technologies here. Happy to answer any question from the community.

I've heard about CheerpJ and your Flash solution too. You guys pump out a lot of pretty sophisticated web middlewares. Supposing people were fully aware of your technology, which application do you think would have the highest yield to be ported to your portfolio of middlewares?

We envision virtualization of corporate internal apps to be of the most interesting markets in the short-medium term. CheerpJ has been very successful in this segment for quite some time already. CheerpX can be seen as an alternative to Citrix, at least for some use cases.

In the longer term we plan to get unmodified Docker containers to work with CheerpX, including exposing REST APIs to the local Web app.

We have also internally speculated about a marketplace-like system to allow immediate conversion of traditional client-side apps to Web apps. This would be intended for the long tail of client software vendors that have not yet adopted Web-first distribution methods.

Re: Webvm: Virtual Machine for the Web

#26

Post by takemetoearth »

Uptrenda wrote: post #9

I think its cool but am I the only one that doesn't really think the web is a good platform for this? Like, VM stuff needs to be as close to bare metal as possible to be fast. There's special processor features that make virtualisation work well. It's amazingly efficient now. You can vastly over-allocate your hardware between VMs with good modern virtualisation software because they're so damn efficient that they onl…

No, a lot of people think this. You just won't find most of them here.

Re: Webvm: Virtual Machine for the Web

#28

Post by odo1242 »

balder1991 wrote: post #18
mmh0000 wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

May your wish be granted: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/ish-shell/id1436902243

This is great in comparison to nothing at all, but honestly it’s quite slow since it emulates a different architecture.

If you’re interested, a-Shell hits a different part of the tradeoff curve where it can run at native speeds and has most of the important built in utilities like ssh, but it’s hard to install additional native software because of iOS restrictions (though python stuff are ok)

Re: Webvm: Virtual Machine for the Web

#30

Post by apignotti »

punnerud wrote: post #27

It also supports Tailscale (or the other way around). If you use SSH from Tailscale Admin it’s actually WebVM you see: https://labs.leaningtech.com/blog/webvm-virtual-machine-with...

CheerpX uses Tailscale, not the other way around. The Tailscale SSH client is built on the same Go stack (compiled to Wasm) used by CheerpX uses.
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