3 days. See <a href="http://bellard.org/jslinux/tech.html" rel="nofollow">http://bellard.org/jslinux/tech.html</a> , linked from the page source.

Not long ago:Last-Modified: Mon, 16 May 2011 21:14:50 GMT

I wonder why he chose this kernel version instead of the latest

uname -a showsLinux (none) 2.6.20 #3 Sat May 14 19:08:30 CEST 2011 i586 GNU/Linux

Not sure how long ago he posted this. This guy never ceases to amaze me. He's the Grigori Perelman of Hackerdom.

This is the most amazing thing I've ever seen in my browser.

The page was near-unreadable for me because the CSS uses the font stack "courier,fixed,swiss,sans-serif", and courier is just too thin and wispy against a black background. I opened Firebug and changed the CSS declaration to be "monospace" and then all was right with the world.That said, it's a phenomenal achievement, and should be a great way for websites to demonstrate command-line tools to people. :)(also: browsers let you store more information with DOM Local Storage than you could in a cookie; If you could expose that to Linux as a block device...)

Yeah. That would be a whole interesting can of worms. Would need PCI/USB/whatever bus your ethernet card was on. Plus emulation of the selected ethernet card itself.Loopback (which is present) is so much simpler.

Implement emulation of a network card... ;) The tech notes page states that "there is no network emulation at this point".

You can't - Javascript can't generate arbitrary network traffic like that. You'll have to wait for someone to write a driver for /dev/json, I guess. ;)

Anyone know how to get the network working? ping/wget don't work. But seriously, this is pretty flippin sweet!

Further update: qemacs works.Unfortunately, M-x spook does not, so he clearly still has some work to do for feature completeness.

Okay, I take that back. My favorite part comes from the tech notes, when he lists all the stuff he added:[... and] my unfinished but usable emacs clone QEmacs.?!? I am wasting my life in comparison to this super-hacker.

Linux on 32-bit x86 assumes the F00F bug on any Pentium CPU, and jslinux emulates a 586.

For the curious: <a href="http://www.rcollins.org/ddj/May98/F00FBug.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.rcollins.org/ddj/May98/F00FBug.html</a>I'd be curious to know if this is was intentional, or a side-effect of the emulation.

Heh, I get 'Illegal instruction' when I compile and run:long main = 0xc8c70ff0;That used to crash my old Pentium box.

My favorite bit:# cat /proc/cpuinfo...f00f bug: yes#Hah!20 bogomips by the way, at least on Chrome on a MacBook Pro.I sense a whole new era of browser performance testing..

Neat. You can mount sysfs like so:<pre><code> # mkdir /sys; mount -t sysfs /sys /sys
</code></pre>
That would allow you to look at the emulated hardware that is present.
Looks like only virtual devices are present -- ram, loopback network etc.Makes sense to me. The MVP here is cpu emulation.

Great idea. That guy deserves it. Though I suspect he would be too modest to accept the money since he GNUed all his creations.

Wikipedia says you have to be a US citizen or resident for the MacArthur grant. As far as I know he's French.

According to the Wikipedia page, you need to be a US citizen or resident to be eligible. He seems to be residing in France and I doubt he has a US citizenship. Otherwise, he definitely fits the bill.

Any Macarthur Grant folks floating around here? Take note! That's an impressive resume.

And still, he has normal job in a normal company... Not in a start-up or not in a mega-tech-corp...

No more excuses, I'm going to finish those damn projects I have on the backburner...Seriously, who does Bellard work for?He seems to leave virtually no trace (other than awesome software) on the Internet. I googled the shit out of him tonite...

Don't forget that he discovered the fastest known algorithm for computing an arbitrary digit of pi.  If you ever are tempted to get egotistical, just think of this guy.  If you are prone to low self esteem, avoid reading about him.

Whatever happened to IOCCC? Last update was they announced an announcement due a year ago; nothing since.

Take a look at his IOCCC entry in 2001/02:OTCC is an Obfuscated Tiny C Compiler for i386-linux. It generates FAST! i386 32 bit code (no bytecode) and it is powerful enough to compile itself. OTCC supports a strict subset of C. This subset is compilable by a standard ANSI C compiler. OTCC compiles, assembles, links and runs C code without the need of any other program.<a href="http://www0.us.ioccc.org/2001/bellard.hint" rel="nofollow">http://www0.us.ioccc.org/2001/bellard.hint</a>(Note for those not familiar with the IOCCC: This is done in 2048 bytes)

One of my favourite hackers is an academic who creates languages just for fun.

Great hackers can use whatever languages/tools they like. The fact that they're being great is not the consequence of the tools they chose, but of the masterpiece work they achieved.I am always fond of such an analogy: in terms of efficiency, the greatest hackers has an algorithmic complexity of O(1); meanwhile, the majority of us may be O(n), if you can manage to get a O(log n) you can make into the club of good hackers. The tools, be it OS, programming languages, etc, are only a constant coefficient to that complexity, i.e., they can make you noticeably more efficient, but they won't improve your "greatness".

So pg was wrong, the greatest hackers don't use Lisp, they write in (and invent) obscure versions of C all day.

Pity me - I work in pretty much the same role as Fabrice in one of his company's direct competitors...

There you go: <a href="http://bellard.org/" rel="nofollow">http://bellard.org/</a>

It's IOCCC. He's Bellard.<a href="http://www.google.com/search?q=site:ioccc.org+bellard" rel="nofollow">http://www.google.com/search?q=site:ioccc.org+bellard</a>

Searching for "tcc" and "tcc unix" returns nothing helpful.Searching for "IOCC" returns nothing, and "IOCC Fabrice" returns a site that is caching HN in realtime, and it's your post.Any help?

After FFmpeg (used in all your TVs and gadgets, very likely), QEmu (used also by Xen and VBox and other), tcc and his IOCC entries, the DVB-T emission with an ATI card, Fabrice comes, once again with something crazy...He is really impressive...

Didn't know about this guy! Unbelievable track record of consistently releasing groundbreaking software. Oh, and the x86 js emulator is cool too! made my day!

~ # tcc -o hello hello.c~ # ./helloHello WorldThat is just too impressive for me to process.

boots in firefox on android although you can't type anything.  I am amazed

Woohoo! Kernel panic! Haven't seen one of those in... well... forever. (Newbie here)Edit: This is damn cool.

cd /bin for binaries. I just tried telnet, but fails as "no network"

adduser works (except you need to create a /home directory)

I don't see vim in there, but there's a minimalistic vi.

I'm utterly dumbfounded. Not only does it boot, it's got emacs, and a compiler.<pre><code> Welcome to JS/Linux 
 ~ # emacs test.c
 ~ # cat test.c 
 void main(void) { 
 printf("Hello World!\n"); 
 } 
 ~ # tcc test.c -o hello 
 ~ # ./hello 
 Hello World!
</code></pre>
[Edit: just realized that there is already a 'hello.c' in the directory that shows just this with better diction.]

Thanks for the info. I got it running locally with those bins you mentioned. There is currently no further backend action.

1): The disk doesn't seem to be emulated; it's just a rootfs in RAM.2): See another thread here.3): Check out cpux86.js. In the start() function at the very end, the following section might be enlighting (even though it is a bit obfuscated by a javascript compressor):<pre><code> function start() {
 [...]
 If=32*1024*1024;
 ya.phys_mem_resize(If);
 ya.load_binary("vmlinux26.bin",0x00100000);
 Jf=ya.load_binary("root.bin",0x00400000);
 start=0x10000;
 ya.load_binary("linuxstart.bin",start);
 ya.eip=start;
</code></pre>
The files vmlinux26.bin, root.bin and linuxstart.bin are fetched from the server.

Unbelievable, this is like magic. I am totally impressed. It is a real linux instance. BTW. I see the hello.c file someone mentioned here. Have we all mounted the same disk image?I see so many use cases for this, but I don't fully understand what is going on behind the scenes. Maybe someone can shed some light on it:<pre><code> 1) How is the disk emulated. Is it a local image, or is it running on the backend?

 2) Is there a remote possibility to get the networking up and running?

 3) Can the disk image be externally accessed to be customized?</code></pre>

I just did 'rm -rf /' then ctrl+D on the terminal. Kernel Panic! Very nicely done! Technical notes here <a href="http://bellard.org/jslinux/tech.html" rel="nofollow">http://bellard.org/jslinux/tech.html</a>

&#62; When he adds X, we can run Firefox inside Linux inside Firefox inside Linux :')Reddit has a meme for that. ;) (downvote away, I've earned it!)

No network connection yet either :(~ # ifconfig<pre><code> lo Link encap:Local Loopback

 inet addr:127.0.0.1 Mask:255.0.0.0 
 
 UP LOOPBACK RUNNING MTU:16436 Metric:1 
 
 RX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0 
 
 TX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0 
 
 collisions:0 txqueuelen:0 
 
 RX bytes:0 (0.0 B) TX bytes:0 (0.0 B</code></pre>

&#62; When he adds X, we can run Firefox inside Linux inside Firefox inside Linux :')Skip the middle man, output gtk via html5 <a href="http://blogs.gnome.org/alexl/2011/03/15/gtk-html-backend-update/" rel="nofollow">http://blogs.gnome.org/alexl/2011/03/15/gtk-html-backend-upd...</a>
(I don't actually know if it still has dependencies on X11 :P)

Interestingly, you can run Firefox inside of Firefox... just enter the url: chrome://browser/content/browser.xul

Sadly my dreams were also crushed when I discovered that lynx wasn't in there.However, wget is there, so all the building blocks are in place.

Indeed, this is completely awesome. I first thought it was some remotely hosted virtual machine, but it really runs inside the browser. Insane! Especially considered how fast it is.When he adds X, we can run Firefox inside Linux inside Firefox inside Linux :')Edit: seems the terminal emulator supports ANSI escape codes such as the 16 Linux colors, but not the XTerm 256 color mode (\e[38;5;CCm) or Konsole 24 bit (\e[38;2;RR;GG;BBm). Guess it could be easily added as it's HTML.

I just tried out my ansi_colours.sh [1] script and it mostly worked.
A few notes:wget is available, and it would be cool to piggy back the linux network stack through the browser.cut &#38; paste support is a must for any terminalThe space characters are very narrow. Needs to be monospace.All fairly minor compared to the coolness of this.[1] <a href="http://www.pixelbeat.org/scripts/ansi_colours.sh" rel="nofollow">http://www.pixelbeat.org/scripts/ansi_colours.sh</a>

There's a port of urxvt to JavaScript: <a href="https://github.com/paddymul/rxvt-js" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/paddymul/rxvt-js</a>

This is completely awesome. When I saw <a href="http://cb.vu" rel="nofollow">http://cb.vu</a> a few years ago I thought hey, someone has finally done it, but that turned out to be a hack. Kudos to Bellard once again.Nitpicking: the terminal emulation is messed up. It keeps resizing horizontally, and less gets confused. I'm sure the terminal emulator was fun to play with. A correct vt100 state machine implementation [1] would probably not be quite as fun [2]. There's a vt100.js library used by a couple projects that might improve things. [3][1] <a href="http://vt100.net/emu/dec_ansi_parser" rel="nofollow">http://vt100.net/emu/dec_ansi_parser</a>[2] <a href="http://vt100.net/emu/vt500_parser.png" rel="nofollow">http://vt100.net/emu/vt500_parser.png</a>[3] <a href="http://fzort.org/bi/o.php" rel="nofollow">http://fzort.org/bi/o.php</a>

If anything deserves a HackerNews circle jerk, this is it.

Just copy-paste it here: <a href="http://jsbeautifier.org/" rel="nofollow">http://jsbeautifier.org/</a>

Thanks both of you, jsbeautify extension now installed. :)<a href="https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/kkioiolcacgoihiiekambdciinadbpfk" rel="nofollow">https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/kkioiolcacgoihiiek...</a>

Paste the source at <a href="http://jsbeautifier.org/" rel="nofollow">http://jsbeautifier.org/</a>
- It makes the source readable

Chrome dev tools now have pretty print built in. Probably need dev channel.

I'm sad the source has been compressed so there's no easy human-readable View Source, like there was on the VAX emulator that came up a few weeks ago. :( Still awe-inspiring, though. :)

What are the high-level steps for writing a driver?

Any volunteers to wrap a websocket transport in an network interface driver? :)

With Guacamole (<a href="http://guacamole.sourceforge.net/" rel="nofollow">http://guacamole.sourceforge.net/</a>) you can run a VNC session in Javascript, so you can have your desktop, but alas this still needs a remote (virtual) machine running the desktop.Hmm if network emulation was added to the javascript VM you could combine it with this.

You can build your own custom Linux distribution, run it in your browser, and share it with others using <a href="http://susestudio.com/" rel="nofollow">http://susestudio.com/</a> — it might not be what you're thinking of (as it's only a few years old, not 10 years), but it does what you mention (and more).

Is there a reason you're still on 3.6, if I might ask?  4.0 is a _much_ better browser....

Feel bad to miss out on this as I am on FF 3.6. But this remind reminded me of a service from a long time ago. Dont remember their name, this was some 10 years ago. But they used to provide a KDE desktop via the browser as a java applet. It was not terribly snappy, but quite surprisingly usable. Any one remembers this ?

Looks so similar to Linux booted on an embedded device. Nostalgia.

I believe Opera does not support typed arrays either.

Even in that case the error messages is still wrong. My browser is up to date, it just does not support the needed feature(s).

<a href="http://nightly.webkit.org/" rel="nofollow">http://nightly.webkit.org/</a>I downloaded a webkit nightly from here, and it works now. Also, of note, the nightly picks up all my Safari settings, so it's not too much of a pain.

It does. It tests for ArrayBuffer support, outputting that message if the necessary constructors aren't found.  What browser are you using that you expect to be supported?  (Safari doesn't have support for ArrayBuffer, but a recent WebKit nightly does, and this runs in that).

Yeah, its a poorly worded error message for anyone running the latest version of Opera

<pre><code> ERROR: your browser is too old to run JS/Linux.
 You should use a recent browser such as Firefox 4.x or Google Chrome.
</code></pre>
No, it isn't. Stop using user-agent matching and start using JavaScript feature detection instead.

Should be able to run it in PhantomJS if you need something headless. <a href="http://www.phantomjs.org/" rel="nofollow">http://www.phantomjs.org/</a>

I just forkbombed my browser. Nothing is sacred anymore.<pre><code> ~ # f(){ f|f &#38; };f
 sh: can't fork
 sh: can't fork
 sh: can't fork
 sh: can't fork
 ...</code></pre>

Another:<a href="http://www.freearchive.org/o/55dfc9935a719fc36ab1d16567972732c2db1fd7d7e3826fd73ee07e4c3c7d0b" rel="nofollow">http://www.freearchive.org/o/55dfc9935a719fc36ab1d1656797273...</a>

Fabrice Bellard is truly impressive. There's a nice article about him, called "Fabrice Bellard: Portrait of a Superproductive programmer", here: <a href="http://www.softwarequalityconnection.com/2011/03/fabrice-bellard-portrait-of-a-superproductive-programmer/" rel="nofollow">http://www.softwarequalityconnection.com/2011/03/fabrice-bel...</a>

It downloads a kernel image (and a disk image) over the network (open the developer tools in your browser and reload the page, you will see 3 .bin files of 1~2MB being transferred)

How is this thing loads the kernel? I've read the <a href="http://bellard.org/jslinux/tech.html" rel="nofollow">http://bellard.org/jslinux/tech.html</a> but it doesn't say, Does it loads it over the net or what?

Awesome - so could you run a web-server from within the browser? Would it be possible to connect to an instance of jslinux remotely?

It even has an incomplete version of Emacs. Emacs!

wow, it is projects like this that get the imagination going and makes you feel bad for putting off a problem set that might have frustrated you at the time.

Yeah try ruby is a great start. Just need the same interface not just in lesson form to allow you to create Ruby on Rails applications

<a href="http://tryruby.org/" rel="nofollow">http://tryruby.org/</a>

I think the Ruby equivalent to that would be HotRuby. <a href="http://hotruby.yukoba.jp/" rel="nofollow">http://hotruby.yukoba.jp/</a>

For Python there exists such a thing, Skulpt ( <a href="http://www.skulpt.org/" rel="nofollow">http://www.skulpt.org/</a> ). It emulates the Python VM in client-side JS.This is somewhat more direct than using Python in Linux on a JS-based emu.

This looks awesome! I'm just starting to learn ruby and was going to look today on whether there was a way to run it in a browser very easily. Wonder if this is the answer

And you are very proud of your Javascript templating library.

If you wanna know what I did:<pre><code> #from a 2.6.38.6 vanilla tree
 wget http://bellard.org/jslinux/config_linux-2.6.20 -O .config
 yes "" | make oldconfig
 # small edit in drivers/tty/serial/8250.c to copy Bellard's patch (http://bellard.org/jslinux/patch_linux-2.6.20)
 make vmlinux
 cp arch/x86/boot/vmlinux.bin /path/to/copy/of/jslinux/hosted/with/a/simple/httpd/
</code></pre>
Edit: I just tried again with a 2.6.20.21 kernel using more or less the procedure showed above: it works! So it must be something with more recent kernels (scheduler ? dynticks ? merging of i386 and x86_68 arch in x86 ? something else ?) that is not emulated by jslinux.

Anyone know why he used 2.6.20 ? I tried compiling a 2.6.38.6, but it doesn't boot. It's stopped at "Starting Linux" and CPU stays at 100% all the time.

Iirc the way to reboot an x86 machine is to triple-fault, i.e. execute an interrupt in an interrupt in an interrupt. Could be done by e.g. marking the pagefault handler's stack space as "not available" in the pagetables.Now if the virtual cpu does not implement that reboot behaviour, the likely result is just an endless recursion of fault handlers. So the script runs an endless loop, hanging Firefox until it notices this and stops it.

Crashed Firefox portable 4.0.1 for me. What's the intended result?

this can be a good tool to for students to learn basic linux commands/usr/bin has many goodiesvi, top, ps, grep, awk

If it doesn't work for you on Chrome 12, this is probably the reason: "it does not work with Chrome 12 beta. As far as I know, it is a bug in the browser"From <a href="http://bellard.org/jslinux/tech.html" rel="nofollow">http://bellard.org/jslinux/tech.html</a>

Actually I thought about doing the same via LLVM and Emscripten. This seems like he emulates x86. Which is probably less hackish but also slower.

When fabrice opens the browser, the kernel compiles itself.

I saw this and thought "how does it know who I am?":io scheduler cfq registered (default)

Why would you want to use QEMU for CS140 and an inferior solution for CS107?

It might be useful for CS education.I have a bit of experience with this as a course helper in the introductory (CS106 series) CS classes at Stanford.I think it could be a very cool platform for assignments in CS107 (where students are introduced to Unix and C programming) or CS110/CS140 (the core OS classes).Instead of ssh-ing into a locked-down cluster computer, students could boot a machine in their browser and get root access. No setup, no configuration. Everyone gets an identical setup, which would be really nice for the people making the assignments. The main thing people would need is a way to save files to a persistent disk. Maybe a filesystem driver could be added that uses HTML5 Local Storage, or talks to a web service running on the class website?Incidentally, students in CS140 are already using Fabrice Bellard's software. You write most of a very simple Unix kernel, testing and running it in QEMU.

Off the top of my head, this seems to be one possibility of having something like a persistent development environment. I could fire up vim, the server could store the environment and I could easily write code from every place with a decent browser.

So any interesting ideas for what this can be used for?

Getting the same thing on Google Chrome 12 on Ubuntu 9.04.

Gets stuck at "Freeing unused Kernel memory: 124k freed" on my Cr-48...

Awesome<pre><code> cd /
 rm -rf ./*
 echo *</code></pre>

Fabrice is one of my all time favorite software engineers. Reading his code, studying his methodologies and learning by copying has been a long time task for me.My first encounter with his code was QEmu, when it was required to run the XO OLPC linux images. Society truly benefits when people like him are devoted in support of open source software.

Anyone else wondering if they're now part of this guys compile/render farm!?

92.3 KB minified for the two JavaScript files.wow!

&#62;"I did it for fun, just because..."Easily the best hack I've seen on HN.

<pre><code> ~ # cat over.c
 main () {
 int i = 0x00ffffff;
 while (i &#62; 0) i--;
 }
 ~ # tcc over.c -o out
 ~ # time ./out
 real 0m 13.58s
 user 0m 13.57s
 sys 0m 0.01s
</code></pre>
I love this stuff.

This is hot! Needs logging facility too but otherwise I'm blown away!

This is explained well in the Technical Notes section of the site.<a href="http://bellard.org/jslinux/tech.html" rel="nofollow">http://bellard.org/jslinux/tech.html</a>

Can you explain the steps necessary to combine a JS x86 interpreter with a binary Linux disk image into a running VM?The part I don't understand is, what environment does the Kernel need to think is there, and how is that done in JS?

The whole idea is to get better performance than current JavaScript interpreters allow. Making something slower than JavaScript is the opposite of why people want a common bytecode.

In theory, someone could create a common bytecode as a library. Such a library would probably use the Relooper algorithm from Emscripten (<a href="https://github.com/kripken/emscripten" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/kripken/emscripten</a>) and JIT the bytecode to Javascript that can then be eval'd for near Javascript-level speed.

&#62; It's called the desktop and offers all the native and low-level stuff you can possibly imagine.Actually, I'd say it's called 'mobile'; The desktop failed to solve the sandboxing problem.&#62; And the only people that want to see it, are the ones who have forgotten about it.As a desktop-turned-mobile developer, I haven't forgotten anything.Simply put, I want a future in which we aren't forced to re-implement our applications multiple times for disparate, proprietary mobile platforms.I already lived through that on the desktop. The only reason I haven't embraced the web for application development is that the technology stack is, by comparison, hobbled.&#62; Maybe there is a middle ground between desktop software and browsers, but personally I'd like to keep them apart.Treating the browser as the sacrosanct temple of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript is throwing away the limited opportunity browsers have to pre-empt Android and iOS as a first-class, standardized application platform.

The desktop has several limitations. First, you have to code separately for each platform because there's not even a common runtime, let alone API. Second, installation and updates are not seamless. Third, it is less secure since native code can have many long-lasting side effects, even without security exploits.Web apps more or less solve all these problems (code can't be completely browser-agnostic, but it's close). Why not add also the benefits of desktop apps?

Qt Quick with its QML environment (UI markup + Javascript + native extensions if you need them) is a great middle ground.It seems that the plan for Qt 5 is to move the enitre Qt toolkit over to the "QML first" model - that is, QML becomes the default way to create interfaces, for both mobile and desktop apps, and native widgets are only used when you require them. They also want to better integrate webkit and web content. In a recent Qt desktop app of mine, I was already doing this: QML + webkit + native backend for the heavy lifting and it works very well. Be awesome to have it as the default in all environments.FWIW, I think QML/JS would have made a greate HTML/CSS/JS alternative.

&#62;This is why so many people want to see the browser execution environment offer more complete, low-level APIs instead of high-level APIs locked to HTML/CSS and legacy browser technology.It's called the desktop and offers all the native and low-level stuff you can possibly imagine.And the only people that want to see it, are the ones who have forgotten about it.Maybe there is a middle ground between desktop software and browsers, but personally I'd like to keep them apart.

I agree that for CPU emulation, something low-level like typed arrays is absolutely necessary.However, with more high-level code, in general there shouldn't be such a need. For example, RPython is very high-level, but is compiled into very efficient C. The same could be done for JavaScript (and to some degree already is).

&#62; I'm beginning to believe NativeClient and PNaCl has the best shot at becoming this.Me too, although the biggest hurdles seem as much political as they are technical.My hope is that Google can strong-arm NativeClient into active use, forcing otherwise recalcitrant browser makers (Mozilla, Apple, Microsoft) into adopting it.

NativeClient is being distributed in the official public build of Chrome, just in a disabled state. You can turn it on in about:flags.

I don't know a lot about NaCl but my gut reaction is that it will be insecure and allow my computer to be remotely exploited.  Why am I wrong?

I would agree, but watching the NativeClient talk at Google IO this year made me much less certain about the commitment. The presenter's answers to questions just seemed to suggest nobody was using it and Google/the developer didn't really care or expect anybody to actually adopt it.Hopefully this was an inaccurate impression, because NaCl could have a huge impact on both the client and serverThe best path to adoption would be for Google to very aggressively push NaCL as a Flash-like plugin. If they could get adoption -- through Unity3d on Facebook or something like that -- perhaps they'd win in the long run. If they just keep it part of Chrome it seems rather hopeless.

Imagine what kind of advances could be made if a common bytecode was establishedI'm beginning to believe NativeClient and PNaCl (LLVM on NaCl: <a href="http://nativeclient.googlecode.com/svn/data/site/pnacl.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://nativeclient.googlecode.com/svn/data/site/pnacl.pdf</a>) has the best shot at becoming this.Google is already including NaCl in Chrome developer builds, so I wouldn't be surprised if they enabled it in releases by the end of the year, and started releasing Native Client applications soon after.<a href="http://blog.chromium.org/2011/02/native-client-getting-ready-for-takeoff.html" rel="nofollow">http://blog.chromium.org/2011/02/native-client-getting-ready...</a>

Have you never used Java Applets? (i.e. JVM in the browser) the load time alone makes that a terrible idea. Not too mention the 'breaking the web/page model' and poor UX that ensued.Strange that people actually think Java would be the saviour. Feel free to keep continue to use Java applets if you think they're superior tech, they should still be well supported.

Seriously? the JVM? You listed the pros, but what about all the cons? Modern JVMs are fast, but highly specialized for long-running applications, which web pages are decidedly not. That's just the tip of the iceberg.

The applet model had/has major issues:* Takes way too long to load the JVM. Deal-breaker for many sites.* Horrible (AWT) and complicated (Swing) UI toolkits that ignored any look-and-feel parity with the rest of the web site or even the web browser itself.* The environment is controlled by Oracle. I don't think they're looking to compete with JS, Flash and Silverlight. Thus web applets (except for niche internal apps) are dead, RIP.

Agreed. And for those who pull the Java applet as the perfect counter-example, they need to ask themselves: does it take this long to start an Android app?
Of course not! Because you can use the JVM in many different ways to eliminate the load time.
In a way, one could imagine Android has a better example of how to mix OS/Web/Multi-Architecture(CPU)

Exactly. I never understood why the web community decided to re-invent this wheel. We started with a model for text publishing (HTML), and are trying to evolve it to allow full blown apps. If browsers simply supported the JVM as the browser execution environment, instead of implementing their own javascript engines, we'd have:1. More language independence2. Great performance for games, video (think implementing codecs without the need for browser support), and for crazy things like this.3. Most importantly, the ability to run actual desktop-like apps in the browser at near-native speeds, instead of the mess that is currently required to get web apps to behave like desktop apps. (Nowadays Rails and friends are hiding most of this mess, but it's still there.)

Factor, Racket, and Lua all have ffi's that are very easy to use. I've never quite liked Lua's metaprogramming, though (macros are very useful when you're writing bindings.) and my least favourite Lua quirk would be the lack of integer types - both other languages have fairly sane (and performant!) numeric towers.That said, I'd give a higher priority for the language in my browser to be safe: some kind of correctness guarantee would be nice. Or even, while we're at it, some kind of way to analyze the script and say "this script GETS from urls x,y, and posts data d to z"

&#62; Its a pity that javascript is so in-grained in client-side web now, as its really a terrible bytecode...Gilad Bracha complains about this at <a href="http://gbracha.blogspot.com/2011/03/truthiness-is-out-there.html" rel="nofollow">http://gbracha.blogspot.com/2011/03/truthiness-is-out-there....</a>

I've always wished that, instead of a "browser language", browsers exposed a LOW LEVEL bytecode environment (which browsers are then free to interpret, JIT compile or on-the-fly AOT compile at page load time). It should be reasonably low level, in that it should provide an abstraction from the hardware, but still allow for very efficient execution of lower level code. Then high level languages and frameworks could be layered on top. This way, browser languages would be 1) more efficient if they need to be and 2) more diverse.Its a pity that javascript is so in-grained in client-side web now, as its really a terrible bytecode... Hell, failing the above, I would have liked to see Lua as the default client-side language, rather than Javascript (for reasons I will mention shortly), but of course that will never happen now that Javascript has been the default for fifteen years.The reasons I would like Lua as the default language, besides the fact that LuaJIT is very fast (certainly for number crunching code, especially if you use the FFI to operate on low level structs (I mean, without calling into C) - the FFI is also one of, if not the, simplest FFI I've seen in any language[1]), it is, at least under my impression, a much more consistent language, while being just as flexible, easy to learn and dynamic. The thing I dislike most about Javascript is that it has lots of little gotchas and inconsistencies. Having said that, though, perhaps Lua does too and I just haven't used it enough yet to get bitten by them. Then again, it didn't take long for this to happen in Javascript, so Lua does at least seem to be a little friendlier.[1] Actually, I think Factor's FFI is similarly simple, if my memory serves me correctly

This is demonstrative of the advantages of the new low-level APIs being added to JavaScript to work efficiently with binary data.Fabrice uses this to implement an x86 interpreter -- it could not be done efficiently without typed arrays. However, it is still slow -- imagine what kind of advances could be made if a common bytecode was established that would be JIT'd by the JavaScript VM, and could be output directly by the emulator.This is why so many people want to see the browser execution environment offer more complete, low-level APIs instead of high-level APIs locked to HTML/CSS and legacy browser technology. Efficiently supporting high-performance, high-complexity systems such as an x86 emulator (or a video game, or custom font rendering, or even an application framework) absolutely require efficient low-level APIs.

there's naclbox: <a href="http://www.naclbox.com/" rel="nofollow">http://www.naclbox.com/</a>
for google's native client.

A more advanced version would allow to use old DOS PC software such as games.well I'm sold.

First thing I did after booting?<pre><code> alias ll='ls -lh'</code></pre>

I don't know why it's so amusing, but the network stack is fully functional for loopback.
Fire up telnetd, and telnet back to yourself.
telnetd -l /bin/sh  -p 23
telnet 127.0.0.1 23
plenty of other services: httpd.. 
what a hoot.

The emulator code is just 86 kb, and it isn't even aggressively minified!<a href="http://bellard.org/jslinux/cpux86.js" rel="nofollow">http://bellard.org/jslinux/cpux86.js</a>

Cloud VPS in the browser. ("Please standby while we create a browser tab for your new instance...")"The browser as the operating."Someone must buzzword the hell out of this and then create a new startup based on it.

Fabris should put donate button on the page! 
I would happily donate to thank him for his great contribution to the Open Source and pushing boundaries of what possible to do with modern technology.
thank U Fabris :)

Well, It's a great way to try out
  rm -rf /

This reminds me of <a href="http://uni.xkcd.com/" rel="nofollow">http://uni.xkcd.com/</a>

Thanks.I expect a response with a lot of emotion.Josep.

I mailed him about it earlier, he says he hasn't decided on a license yet.

What license do you want use to publish this job???

He even ported his tcc compiler to it. Brilliant! I wonder if we could tap into the device file system. Given the increasing number of sensors in mobile phones and no standard way of reading from them, a linux like interface would be awesome.<pre><code> int main (int argc, char **argv)
 {
 int f = open("/dev/android_accelerometer"); 
 double ax = f.read();
 double ay = f.read();
 double az = f.read();
 printf ("Current 3d acceleration: %d %d %d", ax, ay, az);
 return 0;
 }</code></pre>

Why is it that whenever I play with a temporary Linux install, I always end up typing "rm -rf /"?

<pre><code> ~ # httpd
 ~ # telnet 127.0.0.1 80 
 get / http/1.0

 HTTP/1.0 404 Not Found 
 Content-type: text/html 
 Date: Tue, 17 May 2011 20:10:52 GMT 
 Connection: close

 &#60;HTML&#62;&#60;HEAD&#62;&#60;TITLE&#62;404 Not Found&#60;/TITLE&#62;&#60;/HEAD&#62; 
 &#60;BODY&#62;&#60;H1&#62;404 Not Found&#60;/H1&#62; 
 The requested URL was not found 
 &#60;/BODY&#62;&#60;/HTML&#62; 
 Connection closed by foreign host 
 ~ #
</code></pre>
Coolness!

Could someone write a program that would cause a stack overflow, compile it with tcc, and run it?

now I'm wondering how hard it would be to write a commodore 64 or nes emulator in javascript to embed games in webpages?

If you have a programmers.stackexchange.com account, you might want to put a vote in here: <a href="http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/47197/are-there-any-famous-one-man-army-programmers/47240#47240" rel="nofollow">http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/47197/are-the...</a>

There is EMACS TOO!!! This is insane. I am going mad with happiness. I really really have tears in my eyes.

I believe this submission got the highest number of upvotes in HN history.

<a href="http://www.softwarequalityconnection.com/2011/03/fabrice-bellard-portrait-of-a-superproductive-programmer/" rel="nofollow">http://www.softwarequalityconnection.com/2011/03/fabrice-bel...</a>

I tested the JS/Linux with google chrome 12 (beta and gnu/linux) with a new vmlinux26.bin and root.bin compiled using the 2.6.30 kernel with buildroot and work as expected (fine).I don't know what is the problem of the original 2.6.20 linux kernel with JS/Linux but with this new compilation work perfectly.

Now let's mass-email Bellard to coax him into publishing an open-source version. :)

I doubt that's what he means. Regardless, very few people would pay for code like that now that the web is ubiquitous.

GPL has no restriction on selling code, RMS earned his living  money by selling reel tapes of code when GNU was first founded.

I think you should replace "making a profit" to "making a living" off his own work. 
Just because he's a genius does not mean he hasn't every right to monetize his own works as he sees fit.Monetizing OSS is hard and a lot of the time the possible revenue streams are a time-suck. He may not be interested in spending his own time and prefer just instead to licence his work as-is the norm for software producers.From all I've read he's more than happy to receive invitations for licensing of his work, whether or not he'd accept a lump sum to Open Source some of his work is not known. Anyway this is all speculation, if you're genuinely curious you should email him (which is active as I received a reply from him today :)He has remained independent doesn't work for academia or any mega-tech corp and continues to pursue his own interests. I think he has every right to carve out his own path and produce software as he sees fit.

I admire Fabrice a lot, he is a programming hero for me. However it is not true that he is not interested in money, for instance the QEMU module performing the run-time code translation to go fast was not released for free in order to earn from this. I don't know if he managed to earn or not from QEMU in the end, but IMHO that of selling the module to final user was not the right strategy, when QEMU was started and became famous, "virtualization" was an huge buzz and interest for many companies, so many ways to make money from this.Also this new code is not released under a free license, so by default as far he is not sure what he's going to do with the code the "open source way" is not the default. This is not a critique. I think Fabrice Bellard is a genius, but as an observer he seems interested in making a profit from his work like many other programmers.Instead subjectively I've to admit today I no longer consider the GPL a completely free license, but this is another matter and may be related not to earning but to the meaning "free software" has for you. For me it is as simple as letting people to do everything with your code. IMHO the BSD license turns out to be better both for users AND for you to earn from your product later.

Boot a linux kernel right inside your browser.