alt Hacker Newsyeah, it's analogous to Electron.
Electron ships your web app bundled with a browser.
Smol machines ship your software packaged with a linux vm. No need for dependency management or compatibility issues because it is baked in.
I think this is how Codex or Claude Code should be shipped by default, to avoid any isolation issues tbh
How "fat" are the packed machines? In other words, how much bloat is inevitable, or is that entirely controlled by the base image + the user's smolvm machine spec? How does smolvm's pack compare to something like dockerc [0] in terms of speed and size? Disclaimer: I just learned about dockerc!
I can't actually create and test a pack right now because of [1], but I love the idea of using this to distribute applications you might otherwise use a Docker image for.
[0] https://github.com/NilsIrl/dockerc
[1] https://github.com/smol-machines/smolvm/issues/159