Open-sourcing for the webplatform ?

[abflow]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe:

It would be great if any website could have its own "WebOS" and be able to launch their own "Web Containers" in order to have offline-first backend applications directly working into the browser.

Describe the solution you'd like:

Is there any plan on open-sourcing the technology or to begin a standardization process which would allow more actors in the industry to participate to a collective project ?

Describe alternatives you've considered:

Would deno be a better choice than node.js as a wasm component (as deno is built in Rust which is directly compilable to wasm and has a nodejs compatibility layer) ?

Additional context:

The idea of Trusted Desktop Activity has been suggested since november 2018 in the chromium repo.

Some similar ideas from the issue in chromium repo:

One could even compile nodejs to webassembly and run node into the browser with special authorizations for example running node in sandboxed VM mode or allowing access to hard drive only for some user-defined paths for example.

A permissions-based security model similar to the one in Deno could be configured by the user into the browser UI when installing the web application

[milahu]

alternatives

short answer: not really

longer answer ...

webcontainer is a compatibility layer for node apps, similar to wine (Wine Is Not an Emulator)

Wine provides its compatibility layer for Windows runtime system which translates Windows API calls into POSIX API calls -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wine_(software)

so were looking for a compatibility layer between node.js apis and web apis

some node apis have polyfills, see https://github.com/niksy/node-stdlib-browser
but some node apis are hard to polyfill

• child_process
• cluster
• dgram
• dns
• fs
• module
• net
• readline
• repl
• tls

fs has some mocks, see https://github.com/niksy/node-stdlib-browser#mocking-fs

child_process

• https://github.com/chjj/bthreads - 50 stars - abstraction of node apis and web apis
• https://github.com/miketalbot/js-coroutines - 500 stars - Javascript Coroutines for idle processing and animation. based on requestIdleCallback. async communication with web workers (stringify/parse)

related

• https://github.com/plasma-umass/browsix - Unix-like operating system for the browser
  • outdated. requires node 6 (latest is node 19)
  • https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29823022
    • "we use Shared Array Buffers to give the kernel and program a shared view of a process's address space to enable fast system calls between Web Workers and the kernel (running in the main browser thread/context)."
    • "StackBlitz reuses as much as possible the existing V8 runtime from the browser, rather than really running another node.js via WASM."
  • https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13151566
    • "Browsix is not an interpreter. Browsix provides a shared kernel and primitives like system calls to existing interpreters and runtimes that target JavaScript."
• unikernels - run apps in kernelspace, avoid context-switching
  • https://github.com/solo-io/unik - The Unikernel & MicroVM Compilation and Deployment Platform. compiling application sources into unikernels (lightweight bootable disk images) and MicroVM rather than binaries
  • https://github.com/mirage/mirage - https://mirageos.org/ - MirageOS is a library operating system that constructs unikernels
  • https://github.com/cloudius-systems/osv - 4K stars - lightweight operating system, unikernel, linux ABI. OSv is an open-source versatile modular unikernel designed to run single unmodified Linux application securely as microVM on top of a hypervisor, when compared to traditional operating systems which were designed for a vast range of physical machines. Built from the ground up for effortless deployment and management of microservices and serverless apps, with superior performance.
  • https://github.com/nabla-containers/nabla-linux - 50 stars - Experimental Linux Virtual Machine based on UML and noMMU
• emulators
  • https://bellard.org/jslinux/tech.html - x86 emulator + linux
  • https://github.com/copy/v86 - 17K stars - https://copy.sh/v86/ - x86 virtualization in your browser, recompiling x86 to wasm on the fly
• https://github.com/intigos/possimpible - 200 stars - Kernel in TypeScript. A (UNIX|Plan9) Kernel for the browser written in TypeScript
  • re: Unix in the Browser Tab https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29824302
• https://github.com/emscripten-core/emscripten - 23K stars - LLVM-to-WebAssembly Compiler
• https://github.com/jprendes/emception - 200 stars - Run Emscripten in the browser
• https://github.com/CaptainBKola/multithreadingjs - Simple implementation of multithreaded Javascript with web-workers
• cpu-bound or io-bound
  • https://stackoverflow.com/questions/10773564/which-would-be-better-for-concurrent-tasks-on-node-js-fibers-web-workers-or-t
  • https://www.wix.engineering/post/how-wix-applied-multi-threading-to-node-js-and-cut-thousands-of-ssr-pods-and-money
    • Workers (threads) are useful for performing CPU-intensive JavaScript operations. They do not help much with I/O-intensive work.
• https://github.com/search?type=Repositories&l=JavaScript&q=kernel

closed source

• https://github.com/leaningtech/webvm - https://webvm.io/ - WebVM is a server-less virtual Linux environment running fully client-side in HTML5/WebAssembly. WebVM is powered by the CheerpX virtualization engine, which enables safe, sandboxed client-side execution of x86 binaries on any browser. JIT-compiling binaries to WASM = fast
  • https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30167403
    • "StackBlitz' WebContainers have in-browser TCP/IP stack, I think from MirageOS."
  • https://github.com/leaningtech/cheerp-compiler - C/C++ to WASM/JS compiler, based on LLVM. alternative to https://github.com/emscripten-core/emscripten

[jrvidal]

We don't have any immediate plans to open source WebContainers, beyond the API client library in @webcontainer/api.

This might or might not change in the future, but I'm closing this issue for now, as it's not really actionable/trackable. If/when that happened, I'm pretty sure that we would make a lot of noise in https://blog.stackblitz.com/ and other venues.

Thanks for the suggestion!

[stretch07]

@jrvidal any plans yet? offline-first would be perfect for my needs

[sanandnarayan]

just for educational purposes
https://github.com/RealSput/Wenode/blob/main/dist/wenode.js

[stretch07]

just for educational purposes
https://github.com/RealSput/Wenode/blob/main/dist/wenode.js

This is super cool, I'll take a look