Webvm: Virtual Machine for the Web

Hello again HN. Lead dev of WebVM and CTO of Leaning Technologies here. Happy to answer any question from the community.

I've heard about CheerpJ and your Flash solution too. You guys pump out a lot of pretty sophisticated web middlewares. Supposing people were fully aware of your technology, which application do you think would have the highest yield to be ported to your portfolio of middlewares?

We envision virtualization of corporate internal apps to be of the most interesting markets in the short-medium term. CheerpJ has been very successful in this segment for quite some time already. CheerpX can be seen as an alternative to Citrix, at least for some use cases.

In the longer term we plan to get unmodified Docker containers to work with CheerpX, including exposing REST APIs to the local Web app.

We have also internally speculated about a marketplace-like system to allow immediate conversion of traditional client-side apps to Web apps. This would be intended for the long tail of client software vendors that have not yet adopted Web-first distribution methods.

Being able to run docker containers on the web will immediately unlock so many usecases for my work! Right now I've been trying to get a Python sentence parser to run in the browser but it requires a lot of the ecosystem (Pytorch and such). Which is not trivial to compile to WASM.

That would fit our vision for a new generation of Web apps with traditional server-side payloads running client-side, with lots of positive impacts on user privacy and operational costs.

The main difficulties right now are two:

* Most docker containers are 64-bit, while CheerpX currently only support 32-bit x86 code * Due to CORS limitations it is not currently possible to downloaded layers from repositories such as Docker Hub

The first limitation will be eventually fixed, the second one will require a specialized repository, a proxy, or co-operation from the existing repositories.