THthunderbong·Nov 20, 2024Submission
Webvm: Virtual Machine for the Web
205 points · Open discussionleaningtech
webvm
Svelte2022–2025
leaningtech / webvm
webvm
Virtual Machine for the Web
10Distinct people
14Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
17.5KGitHub stars
What to know before exploring
What it is
Virtual Machine for the Web
GitHub
Where it is used
No documented product use has been verified yet.
What people are saying
No recommendation phrase was found in the indexed comments.
No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.
Also in these discussions
No other repository is repeatedly linked in the same discussions.
This week on Hacker News
Nov 8–Nov 15 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/15/2026, 1:03:20 AM UTC.
No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.
Mentions over time
HN mentions by year14 dated mentions
Observed mentions: 2022-02-02 02:28:20 UTC to 2025-06-29 10:01:39 UTC.
Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.
View mention counts and date ranges
| Period | Start (UTC) | End (exclusive, UTC) | Mentions | Submissions | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2022 | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2 | 0 | 2 |
| 2023 | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 3 | 1 | 2 |
| 2024 | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 8 | 2 | 6 |
| 2025 | 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
What Hacker News says
8 sourcesPerformance is expected to be between 3x-10x slowdown depending on the workload, which for this class of systems is quite good. The gap, especially on the high end, will further shrink as the virtualization engine improves.
Not all parts of the ISA are as well optimized currently. The codegen for integer operations (the most common by far) is very sophisticated. Floating point and vector operations still have a pretty basic implementation.
WebVM can run any distro, barring bugs in our syscall layer of course :-)
You can add your own Dockerfile and deploy a custom version on GitHub: https://github.com/leaningtech/webvm/?tab=readme-ov-file#for...
In WebVM 2.0: A complete Linux Desktop Environment in the browser via WebAssemblyI stumbled upon Leaningetch in the past looking for a way to compile Java to JavaScript. This is a company that found a niche in "modernizing" old software, like, serving customers that still have mission-critical software written as a C++/MFC or even Java Applets and help them keep that software alive.
There's nothing wrong with their niche, but I feel like there's a big disconnect to what could be attractive to the HN crowd. In particular:
> WebVM is released under the Apache License, Version 2.0 [...] free to use for technological exploration, testing and non-commercial uses. [...] If you want to build a product on top of CheerpX/WebVM, please get in touch: sales@leaningtech.com. [0]
Embarcadero is another company that releases great-looking tech but I would personally not want to dig too much into [1], because of the involved costs.
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Read the rest
WebVM: A Linux virtual machine that runs in the browser
3 points · Open discussionWell, the environment itself is a container. Supporting Linux "namespaces" used to implement containers is also a possibility.
As described in the project README we provide a GitHub Action workflow to convert Dockerfiles into bootable images for WebVM: https://github.com/leaningtech/webvm
In WebVM is a server-less virtual Linux environment running client-side1. Support for traditional copy/paste shortcuts is problematic, since Ctrl-C is interpreted as the SIGINT signal. Copying via the mouse menu should work. Pasting is supported via Ctrl+Shift+V.
2. We had these reported from several users and we will investigate as soon as we can: https://github.com/leaningtech/webvm/issues/102
To answer you question: filesystem chunks are cached/persisted using a local IndexedDB. It provides a fairly strong level of persistence, although the user can wipe it out of course.
In WebVM is a server-less virtual Linux environment running client-sidePer their docs, yes: https://github.com/leaningtech/webvm/blob/main/docs/Tailscal...
In WebVM is a server-less virtual Linux environment running client-side"password", per https://github.com/leaningtech/webvm/blob/main/dockerfiles/d...
In WebVM is a server-less virtual Linux environment running client-side