This all comes full circle, because now I'm building a true successor to JSLinux that's way faster because I've natively compiled the kernel/userspace to wasm, and of course I'm using xterm.js for the terminal emulation.
If you like buggy demos that probably shouldn't be shared yet, you should check out https://linux.tombl.dev, but note that it's currently just a busybox shell and nothing else, so I hope you're good with `echo *` instead of `ls`.
I knew about QEMU, ffmpeg, his LTE stuff, and QuickJS. I had no idea xterm.js started with him too.
attempted to munmap
------------[ cut here ]------------
WARNING: CPU: 3 PID: 36 at kernel/exit.c:812 0x00000000
CPU: 3 PID: 36 Comm: sh Not tainted 6.1.132 #
Stack:
at vmlinux.o.__warn (https://linux.tombl.dev/dist/vmlinux-NLTKI6YG.wasm:wasm-function[278]:0x17655)
at vmlinux.o.warn_slowpath_fmt (https://linux.tombl.dev/dist/vmlinux-NLTKI6YG.wasm:wasm-function[279]:0x1772b)
at vmlinux.o.do_exit (https://linux.tombl.dev/dist/vmlinux-NLTKI6YG.wasm:wasm-function[329]:0x1985e)
at vmlinux.o.task_entry_inner (https://linux.tombl.dev/dist/vmlinux-NLTKI6YG.wasm:wasm-function[154]:0x12249)
at vmlinux.o.task_entry (https://linux.tombl.dev/dist/vmlinux-NLTKI6YG.wasm:wasm-function[153]:0x12155)
at self.onmessage (https://linux.tombl.dev/dist/worker-MHWHWELT.js:151:53)
---[ end trace 0000000000000000 ]---
Bah. Details, details dismissive hand wave.
It's just minimalism, right? I hear it's all the rage.
Since I map guest threads 1:1 to host threads in JS, and architecture-specific code manages the loading/unloading of programs, the exec syscall is exercising these lies in a way that they're not currently equipped to handle.
What I'm currently doing is improving those lies to the point where exec stops noticing they're lies and just starts functioning as expected.
I opened that on my Android Phone and half expected it not to boot at all. But it does. I have no idea about the state of WASM n stuff, but apparently, it's much more eadvanced than I anticipated. Mind blown.
[1] https://github.com/xtermjs/xterm.js [2] https://github.com/chjj/term.js
If I built any one of the things he's built (ffmpeg, qemu, tinyc) I would never stop bragging about it. Instead, he just keeps hacking on other cool stuff.
Of course, back in Renaissance days it was the ICs/artists job to court benefactors -- though sometimes they did approach unsolicited.
Maybe he already has patronage but he doesn't want to flash it around...
This guy should have had a Macarthur grant a decade ago.
The list of brilliant stuff he has done is longer than my arm, and I have long arms.
I also upvoted all the comments mentioning that he should have a grant. In my opinion, he really should have.
Probably that's exactly what he doesn't want.
When making an application one should look from the user perspective.
Say you want to start a business. You edit the profile page, check the entrepreneur box, it goes into a kind of supper pursuit mode with menus folding out, you fill out the company name, >>click<< the button to generate a bank number, a tax number, a registration number, a phone number, a domain name, hosting, etc If you sell something it goes into the bank account and sales tax or vat is subtracted. You press the add employee button, pick a standard contract and fill out the hours per week. Salaries will come out of your government bank account with income tax subtracted automatically. The generated website lists your products and services and is aggregated into a complete country-wide db with everything in it and a glorious search interface. Investors can log in on the website automatically. Upload the business plan if you have one so that AI can give you free money.
Real estate listings pop up, the right machines to buy, office equipment, potential employees...
An agenda is generated with a list of people the AI thinks you should be talking to. Check the box to plan the appointments.
Add music, sound effects and animations to everything as if we are 5 years old.
https://jamesfriend.com.au/pce-js/ (https://github.com/jsdf/pce)
https://www.pcjs.org/ (lots of hardware and OSes) (https://github.com/jeffpar/pcjs)
Mac OS
https://infinitemac.org/ (https://blog.persistent.info/2023/03/infinitemac-dot-org.htm...)
https://jamesfriend.com.au/projects/basiliskii/BasiliskII-wo...
https://www.file-hunter.com/AMIGA/
https://www.file-hunter.com/MSX/ (MSX! via WebMSX)
https://github.com/bellard/quickjs/blob/master/quickjs.c
(Obviously different approaches suits different circumstances.)
Also I should note that longer code doesn't mean less abstraction; it rather means that abstraction is done without separate functions and files, and ordering and visual cues can (and probably should heavily) be used instead. Apparently this is not enough for most others though, as I have received multiple complaints in spite of such readability efforts.
E.g. monolith -> modular monolith -> microservices
Has written his own editor, presumably to support preferred working style, using emacs idiom for UI.
While it being a very large file, it's sorted somewhat semantically, so it's easy to work on adding a new iterator method, for example, since they are all close to each other.
Also, this would depend on language of choice. JVM, for example, might not inline function above certain threshold of bytecode instructions.
I never navigate by files in my code bases, it's all based on search and "jump to" type navigation.
https://ktock.github.io/container2wasm-demo/
with emscripten Browser networking via fetch, or a Posix compat websocket proxy
https://ktock.github.io/container2wasm-demo/amd64-debian-was...
https://github.com/container2wasm/container2wasm?tab=readme-...
"Windows 2000 Server named peak Microsoft. Readers say it's all been downhill since Clippy"
https://www.theregister.com/2025/04/11/windows_2000_best_mic...
I feel like open-source inherently has alignment with users and blockers to enshitification
French tech used to have a reputation for Renault old car quality, but I did not see it. Even in Renault and Citroen I came to admire them. On the other hand working with German SE is hard because they are incredibly set on not invented here. My generalisation for whatever it is worth.
In general the issue of Europe tech scene is simple: we suck at selling and optimise for resource efficiency(competitive salary means never pay above rate no matter what). Americans optimise for growth and will risk paying for higher so they can amortise costs with growth.
On a final note, where I come from there is lots of sneer that France is a dump due to immigration. While that is a point of view, it is definitely true they have also brain drained their colonies and have very capable productive individuals coming from there. Myself I had my master’s tutor from cot-de-Ivoir and in bootlin also worked with top of the shelf engineers that have non francophone names.
Jean Ichbiah - big contributor to Ada
Alain Colmerauer - creator of Prolog
Jean-Marie Hullot - iCal, iSync, NeXTSTEP GUI builder, CTO of Applications at Apple in early 2000s
Philippe Kahn - founder of Borland, inventor of first camera-phone
Olivier Fourdan - creator of Xfce, big contributor to Wayland
Jean-Baptiste Kempf - creator of VLC
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/OCaml
Bertrand Meyer, creator of Eiffel.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eiffel_(programming_language...
Not to be overly snarky, but it's a good thing, since none of those people's output is comparable to FB's. The thought there might be another programmer like him was an interesting one to entertain...
Statically there’s probably others working in private, not publishing in open.
I am glad to see all the forks mentioned here, need to see which one runs bareDOOM best and if any have working sound perhaps..
Only wayland RISC-V 64bits binaries from now on, even for the web.
We don't need anything else anymore.
Where is the complete source code for this?
The Windows 2000 sources are probably leaked somewhere on Github, or you could apply for a job with Microsoft maybe. I managed to get ReactOS to boot in JSLinux once by installing it into a standard QEMU image and splitting the image into chunks as required by the emulator code. You need quite a fast CPU to run a full, modern OS at acceptable speeds, though.
But does this support recursion? I'd like to run JSLinux in my browser and then point its Browser to https://www.bellard.org/jslinux/ which then starts another JSLinux which opens the browser on JSLinux which ...
JSLinux isn't another Linux but a landmark of postmodern philosophy, and OP most def forgot to credit Baudrillard.
crazy cool.