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petcattoday at 6:02 PM6 repliesview on HN

I've always been fascinated by this, but I have never known what it would be useful for. Does anyone know of any practical use cases?


Replies

toast0today at 6:35 PM

I use a similar emulator (v86) as a way to share my hobby OS. Approximately zero people, even my friends, are going to boot my hobby OS on real hardware; I did manage to convince some of them to run it in qemu, but it's difficult. A browser environment shows the thing quite well; and easy networking is cool too.

My hobby OS itself is not very useful, but it's fun if you're in the right mood.

omoikanetoday at 6:15 PM

I use bellard.org/jslinux to test compilation of strange code sometimes[1], since it came with compilers that are different versions from what I have installed locally, and it's easier to open up a browser than starting a VM.

[1] For example:

https://www.ioccc.org/2020/yang/index.html#:~:text=tcc%200.9...

https://www.ioccc.org/2018/yang/index.html#:~:text=tcc%200.9...

redleader55today at 7:05 PM

Agentic workloads create and then run code. You don't want to just run that code in a "normal" environment like a container, or even a very well protected VM. There are other options, ofc - eg. gvisor, crossvm, firecracker, etc, but this one is uncommon enough to have a small number of attackers trying to hack it.

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s-macketoday at 6:19 PM

Most such emulators have Internet access on the IP level. Therefore, this is a very cheap way to test anything on the Internet.

    apk add nmap
    nmap your.domain.com
However, the speed is heavily throttled. You can even use ssh and login to your own server.

It can also be used as a very cheap way to provide a complete build environment on a single website, for example to teach C/C++. Or to learn the shell. You don't have to install anything.

varun_chtoday at 6:10 PM

Maybe if you’ve got some ancient software that’s missing source code and only runs with X Y and Z conditions, you could continue to offer it on the web and build around it like that? Not sure if that would be practical at all, but could be interesting

maxlohtoday at 6:12 PM

My college professor used it to teach us the Linux command line

We have Windows PCs in the classroom.

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