Blink virtual machine now supports running GUI programs

One of those projects that is just so neat it engenders a desire to go do something fun with it!<p>Maybe you build proton and have any windows game (or software?) in the browser?

If this is what it takes to get developers to care about native code again, I&#x27;m all for it.

If someone is looking for some low hanging fruit in the way of contributing to cosmopolitan, they could teach its scanf()[1] family about floats[2]. (May not be as low-hanging as it first appears though, as converting floats correctly is trickier than it might first appear to be. The comments in the code say it can do floats, but the comments are mistaken.)<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;jart&#x2F;cosmopolitan&#x2F;blob&#x2F;master&#x2F;libc&#x2F;fmt&#x2F;vcscanf.c#L48">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;jart&#x2F;cosmopolitan&#x2F;blob&#x2F;master&#x2F;libc&#x2F;fmt&#x2F;vc...</a> [2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;jart&#x2F;cosmopolitan&#x2F;issues&#x2F;456">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;jart&#x2F;cosmopolitan&#x2F;issues&#x2F;456</a>

Recent and related:<p><i>A 116kb WASM of Blink that lets you run x86_64 Linux binaries in the browser</i> - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=34367767" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=34367767</a> - Jan 2023 (69 comments)<p><i>Emulating an emulator inside itself. Meet Blink</i> - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=34250352" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=34250352</a> - Jan 2023 (107 comments)

Note that this is not Blink the rendering engine that powers Chromium and related browsers, but <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;jart&#x2F;blink">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;jart&#x2F;blink</a>, “a virtual machine that runs x86-64-linux programs on different operating systems and hardware architectures”.<p>Where this talks of running GUI programs, I presume it means that the VM can act as an X client. You would thus still need an X server. I don’t know what may exist along those lines for the web. As for native&#x2F;desktop hosts, well, I hope you weren’t ever trying to use emulation as any form of <i>security</i>, because the likes of Xorg <i>really</i> aren’t designed for that use case.

From <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;StriderMyshkin&#x2F;status&#x2F;1621418431575896064" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;StriderMyshkin&#x2F;status&#x2F;162141843157589606...</a><p>&gt;<i>A pathway to a blazingly fast WSL?</i>

I wonder if blink could be used as a lightweight sandbox. Looking at PR46[0], it seems sandboxing is not one of the current features, but it would be cool to have a way to run arbitrary code (e.g: Python) in a sandboxed environment. Even cooler if you could limit the amount of memory&#x2F;CPU used.<p>[0]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;jart&#x2F;blink&#x2F;pull&#x2F;46#pullrequestreview-1264664859">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;jart&#x2F;blink&#x2F;pull&#x2F;46#pullrequestreview-1264...</a>

But this is not cross platform, right? It is specific to x11

I&#x27;m interested in using this for running x86 games on aarch64 Linux using Wine, do you think this would be useful as part of something like box64?

Are there any limitations in the linux binaries that can run in the VM ? (statically linked only ?)

Could this be ported to run on PowerPC Macs?

Art!

From the same author that did Cosmopolitan C and... Occupy Wall Street?<p>Damn, I don&#x27;t do enough things

So we invented Java again?

I always think these announcements are about <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blink.sh&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blink.sh&#x2F;</a><p>I don’t know why it’s okay to steal product names like that.