Show HN: Tiny VM sandbox in C with apps in Rust, C and Zig
1–10 of 15 posts
Re: Show HN: Tiny VM sandbox in C with apps in Rust, C and Zig
#2"Just add rats" https://github.com/ringtailsoftware/uvm32/tree/main/apps/zig...
Re: Show HN: Tiny VM sandbox in C with apps in Rust, C and Zig
#3I suppose this is in the same realm as what some people are trying to do with WASM, creating a common execution environment? This is built on RISC-V instead though. I wish I knew more about the limitations/capabilities of each approach, but in any case a future where applications are built for a common VM seems like something we've been building to for a while, the modern web being the closest we've come.
Re: Show HN: Tiny VM sandbox in C with apps in Rust, C and Zig
#4I suppose this is in the same realm as what some people are trying to do with WASM, creating a common execution environment? This is built on RISC-V instead though. I wish I knew more about the limitations/capabilities of each approach, but in any case a future where applications are built for a common VM seems like something we've been building to for a while, the modern web being the closest we've come.
See https://opensource.googleblog.com/2025/11/secure-by-design-f...
This looks like it has a smaller code footprint at least. I'm not sure RISC-V is a very good target for this sort of thing. E.g. decoding the immediates in software is going to be very slow, whereas in hardware it's fast.
But on the other hand it is a stable target and can be configured to be a lot simpler than WASM.
Re: Show HN: Tiny VM sandbox in C with apps in Rust, C and Zig
#5I suppose this is in the same realm as what some people are trying to do with WASM, creating a common execution environment? This is built on RISC-V instead though. I wish I knew more about the limitations/capabilities of each approach, but in any case a future where applications are built for a common VM seems like something we've been building to for a while, the modern web being the closest we've come.
See https://opensource.googleblog.com/2025/11/secure-by-design-f... This looks like it has a smaller code footprint at least. I'm not sure RISC-V is a very good target for this sort of thing. E.g. decoding the immediates in software is going to be very slow, whereas in hardware it's fast. But on the other hand it is a stable target and can be configured to be a lot simpler than WASM.
Thanks for the link, Wasefire looks interesting. I suspect that their design goals are very different to mine. https://github.com/ringtailsoftware/uvm32?tab=readme-ov-file...
Re: Show HN: Tiny VM sandbox in C with apps in Rust, C and Zig
#6I suppose this is in the same realm as what some people are trying to do with WASM, creating a common execution environment? This is built on RISC-V instead though. I wish I knew more about the limitations/capabilities of each approach, but in any case a future where applications are built for a common VM seems like something we've been building to for a while, the modern web being the closest we've come.
I did a brief comparison a while back, specifically WASM vs libriscv for. I decided to go with WASM, primarily because it was much more closely designed for this sort of thing, and it works in browsers. libriscv is really cool and impressive though.
EDIT: Found this link in my notes as well: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24900376
Re: Show HN: Tiny VM sandbox in C with apps in Rust, C and Zig
#7I suppose this is in the same realm as what some people are trying to do with WASM, creating a common execution environment? This is built on RISC-V instead though. I wish I knew more about the limitations/capabilities of each approach, but in any case a future where applications are built for a common VM seems like something we've been building to for a while, the modern web being the closest we've come.
I did a brief comparison a while back, specifically WASM vs libriscv for. I decided to go with WASM, primarily because it was much more closely designed for this sort of thing, and it works in browsers. libriscv is really cool and impressive though. EDIT: Found this link in my notes as well: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24900376
libriscv looks amazing but its's much larger. It says "Less than 40kB total memory usage".
My first version (unpublished) of uvm32 was called uvm80 and emulated a Zilog Z80 CPU. My aim is to have a safe, embeddable sandbox for any device, rather than the best performance.
Re: Show HN: Tiny VM sandbox in C with apps in Rust, C and Zig
#8[flagged]
Re: Show HN: Tiny VM sandbox in C with apps in Rust, C and Zig
#9[flagged]
They went off a tip sent in via email. They probably click those phishing links too. Not the brightest of folks hunting for criminals.
(and yet they still catch some, which is telling of the criminal). Fact is this happens all the time in the USA. It’s why I don’t stream any development of games or tech despite me creating.
Re: Show HN: Tiny VM sandbox in C with apps in Rust, C and Zig
#10Really neat clean code!
I like the single C file, but Docker if you want all the examples approach, that's really convenient for embedded.
Test coverage looks good as well, be interesting to see the metrics.
This would be quite cool for adding scripting to medical devices, avoiding the need to revalidate the "core" each time you change a feature.
An interesting comparison would be against an embedded WASM bytecode interpreter like https://github.com/bytecodealliance/wasm-micro-runtime, which is still much larger at 56.3K on a Cortex M4F. Maybe WASM is just a more complicated instruction set than the smallest RISCV profile?