Ask HN: Who wants to collaborate?

I want the web to be more end-user programmable. Web apps big and small should offer plugin extension mechanisms! Ideally plug-ins are frictionless to author, and powerful enough to build fun UIs. Today, only really big premier apps like Figma and Google Docs have this kind of feature.

One problem is that it’s very difficult for an app to run arbitrary, untrusted user code in a way that’s secure and efficient, especially in the browser. Apps need to worry about XSS and unintended remote code execution, much less try adding those things as a feature.

I started working on a Typescript/WebAssembly library around the QuickJS JavaScript runtime to address this need. QuickJS runs modern ES2020 and provides an API for the host process to set CPU and memory budgets for the execution environment, which is completely sandboxed. My work so far exposes a basic interface to create VMs, expose APIs from the host to the guest, and evaluate code.

Repo: https://github.com/justjake/quickjs-emscripten

NPM: https://www.npmjs.com/package/quickjs-emscripten

Areas of work:

- Make the library importable as ES modules on the web without a Webpack build step.

- Design higher-level but still security-conscious APIs for building plugin systems on top of the existing library.

- Expose more QuickJS C APIs to library users.

- Performance or ergonomic improvements.

If you share any of these goals or would like to help out, please drop me a line on GitHub (eg by opening an issue), or via any of the links on my HN profile.

Hey there! Sure! Sent you an email!

Working in a GENERAL relational language (ie: not just a query one, like SQL, but general to make full apps, like python/delphi/c# + linq):

https://tablam.org

that is my attempt to resurrect the spirit of the FoxPro/dbase kind of tools.

Is on Rust, and is also my way to sharp my skills on it.

Now, I'm in the process of improve the parsing to be robust like in Rust, so i can show good error messages:

https://github.com/brendanzab/codespan

and also, hopefully, implement a solid type inference that work fine with the challenge of infer joins like "customer CROSS JOIN address".

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The idea, long-term, is create a tool alike MS Access/FoxPro+Excel that I think could be great for a lot of companies (that are using stuff like "BigData" tools -like hadoop- when them are struggling with more fundamental issues!) and improve the condition of make business apps/analysis.

I already hear some interest when the vision is described in full, and I certain any company that use Excel/Access to deal with data and/or make business apps is anemically served by it.

The alternatives now are only for the cloud, and I instead wanna a local-first/on-premise offering...

Yeah but that site has a strong monetary angle from what I can tell. This is just a simple list board of people sharing ideas.

I expect you already know about this, but Secure EcmaScript is a similar project: https://medium.com/agoric/ses-securing-javascript-in-the-rea...

Similarly the older Caja project: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caja_project