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plasma-umass
Ninia
TypeScript2015–2016
plasma-umass / Ninia

Ninia

Python interpreter in JavaScript

2Distinct people
2Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
20GitHub stars
REPOSITORY AT A GLANCE

What to know before exploring

What it is

Python interpreter in JavaScript

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

Mentioned in the same Hacker News threads. That is not proof they are substitutes.

This week on Hacker News

Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 5:04:57 PM 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 month2 dated mentions

Observed mentions: 2015-08-10 17:11:41 UTC to 2016-04-16 19:00:56 UTC.

012015-08-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2015-09-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 commentsAug 20152015-09-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2015-10-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2015-10-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2015-11-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2015-11-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2015-12-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2015-12-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 commentsDec 20152016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2016-02-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2016-02-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2016-03-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2016-03-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2016-04-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2016-04-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2016-05-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 commentsApr 2016

Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.

View mention counts and date ranges
UTC ranges include their start and exclude their end. Select a period to filter the source evidence.
PeriodStart (UTC)End (exclusive, UTC)MentionsSubmissionsComments
Aug 20152015-08-01 00:00:00 UTC2015-09-01 00:00:00 UTC101
Sep 20152015-09-01 00:00:00 UTC2015-10-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Oct 20152015-10-01 00:00:00 UTC2015-11-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Nov 20152015-11-01 00:00:00 UTC2015-12-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Dec 20152015-12-01 00:00:00 UTC2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Jan 20162016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2016-02-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Feb 20162016-02-01 00:00:00 UTC2016-03-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Mar 20162016-03-01 00:00:00 UTC2016-04-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Apr 20162016-04-01 00:00:00 UTC2016-05-01 00:00:00 UTC101

What Hacker News says

2 sources
I actually embarked on a similar Python VM called Ninia [1] awhile back, but shelved it as other projects became more important. Ninia supports multiple threads and preempts execution to give the browser breathing space, just like my JVM in JavaScript, DoppioJVM [2]. One of the challenges of Python is its objects are quite complex/ad-hoc, and can be overridden by the user. I mapped out [3] how I wanted to map Python objects to JavaScript objects, but never had the time to implement it fully. (That document covers Python 2.7; I'm sure there are differences for 3.) It looks like this project has a lot of work to do if it wants to have parity with a native Python VM! But that's part of the fun of writing these things. Best of luck on the VM! If you need a file system to plug into the VM for loading modules/implementing the FS API, do check o
Read the rest
ut my BrowserFS library [4], which is currently in use at the Internet Archive [5] and is also used in Ninia/DoppioJVM. You can also cop things from Ninia, as it is MIT licensed. Oh yeah, and if you need a Python compiler/parser, you can simply run the PyPy interpreter's parser+compiler [6] in your intepreter once it is reasonably complete. It is written in 100% Python! [1] https://github.com/plasma-umass/ninia [2] https://github.com/plasma-umass/doppio [3] https://github.com/plasma-umass/Ninia/wiki/Mapping-Python-Ob... [4] https://github.com/jvilk/browserfs [5] http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/4924 [6] https://pypy.readthedocs.org/en/latest/interpreter.html
In Jaspy – A Python VM written in JavaScript
We (PLASMA @ UMass, http://plasma.cs.umass.edu) have a project with similar aims that is somewhat further along: Ninia (https://github.com/plasma-umass/Ninia). Ninia is a Python bytecode interpreter in TypeScript. It is also being integrated with Doppio, a runtime system for running "conventional" programs inside the browser (https://github.com/plasma-umass/doppio), also from our group. DoppioJVM uses Doppio to run JVM bytecode in the browser (http://www.doppiojvm.org/). For technical details on both of these, see our PLDI 2014 paper: "Doppio: Breaking the Browser Language Barrier", by John Vilk (https://jvilk.com/) and Emery D. Berger (http://emeryberger.com): https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2594293 (@ ACM), http://people.cs.umass.edu/~emery/pubs/doppio.pdf (non-paywall), video presentation here: https://vimeo.com/106106738. Abstract:
Read the rest
Web browsers have become a de facto universal operating system, and JavaScript its instruction set. Unfortunately, running other languages in the browser is not generally possible. Translation to JavaScript is not enough because browsers are a hostile environment for other languages. Previous approaches are either non-portable or require extensive modifications for programs to work in a browser. This paper presents Doppio, a JavaScript-based runtime system that makes it possible to run unaltered applications written in general-purpose languages directly inside the browser. Doppio provides a wide range of runtime services, including a file system that enables local and external (cloud-based) storage, an unmanaged heap, sockets, blocking I/O, and multiple threads. We demonstrate Doppio's usefulness with two case studies: we extend Emscripten with DOPPIO, letting it run an unmodified C++ application in the browser with full functionality, and present DoppioJVM, an interpreter that runs unmodified JVM programs directly in the browser. While substantially slower than a native JVM (between 24× and 42× slower on CPU-intensive benchmarks in Google Chrome), DoppioJVM makes it feasible to directly reuse existing, non compute-intensive code.
In Run Python Bytecode in Your Browser

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