alt Hacker NewsThe thing I most want to use this (or some other WASM Linux engine) for is running a coding agent against a virtual operating system directly in my browser.
Claude Code / Codex CLI / etc are all great because they know how to drive Bash and other Linux tools.
The browser is probably the best sandbox we have. Being able to run an agent loop against a WebAssembly Linux would be a very cool trick.
I had a play with v86 a few months ago but didn't quite get to the point where I hooked up the agent to it - here's my WIP: https://tools.simonwillison.net/v86 - it has a text input you can use to send commands to the Linux machine, which is pretty much what you'd need to wire in an agent too.
In that demo try running "cat test.lua" and then "lua test.lua".
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> The thing I most want to use this (or some other WASM Linux engine) for is running a coding agent against a virtual operating system directly in my browser.
That exists: https://github.com/container2wasm/container2wasm
Unfortunately I found the performance to be enough of an issue that I did not look much further into it.
Simon, this HN post didn't need to be about Gen AI.
This thing is really inescapable those days.
Check out Jeff Lindsay's Apptron (https://github.com/tractordev/apptron), comes very close to this, and is some great tech all on its own.
We are working on exactly this: https://browserpod.io
For a full-stack demo see: https://vitedemo.browserpod.io/
To get an idea of our previous work: https://webvm.io
This is not the technical solution you want, but I think it provides the result that you want: https://github.com/devcontainers
tldr; devcontainers let you completely containerize your development environment. You can run them on Linux natively, or you can run them on rented computers (there are some providers, such as GitHub Codespaces) or you can also run them in a VM (which is what you will be stuck with on a Mac anyways - but reportedly performance is still great).
All CLI dev tools (including things like Neovim) work out of the box, but also many/most GUI IDEs support working with devcontainers (in this case, the GUI is usually not containerized, or at least does not live in the same container. Although on Linux you can do that also with Flatpak. And for instance GitHub Codespaces runs a VsCode fully in the browser for you which is another way to sandbox it on both ends).