Hi, Lead Dev of WebVM and CTO of Leaning Technologies here. Happy to answer any questions you might have... potentially in a few hours, it's quite late here :-)
> Last but not least, an IRC server/channel in lieu of discord? I'm stuck in my ways!
IRC is nice for people who use it, but it has a huuuuge barrier to entry for new users. The very first thing you have to do is choose a client out of a list of 100 clients, half of which haven't been maintained since 2003. Then you need to set up a bouncer somewhere so that you can see messages that were posted when you were away. Those two things will filter out 99.99% of new people.
Or, you could use Discord (or Matrix); people sign up for an account and that's it.
Our open-source project switched from IRC to Matrix (after having been on IRC for over a decade before that), and got a noticeable uptick in engagement.
Unfortunately, Matrix still has some long-standing UI quirks, which would make me reluctant to use it in a context where I want people to pay me money; particularly if some of those are non-technical users.
3. Discover you can't join a lot of channels because you're not registered; or worse, that your messages sent to the channel are silently discarded
And you still have the problem that if you're in the wrong time zone and happen to close the window, you may miss responses.
There are advantages to having high barriers to entry for a community; Ham radio is essentially a global chat room with an entrance exam, for instance. But there are costs too.
Your point 3. is true generally, but - as I understand - parent wanted to operate a customer support channel and dismissed IRC. In this case: just don't lock your channel for Guests.
Timezones affect other platforms, but an IRC bot might help customers when admins sleep.
But I'm not sure IRC is best for this use case (e.g. forums, wiki are probably better), but "high barrier of entry" is arguable.
Another option is a community hosted Mattermost (it's like Discord/Slack/IRC). It's pretty easy to run, all the chat are in PostgreSQL so it's "easy" to produce archive logs (like IRC has). Or do any other magic.
IRC <3 Still daily driving it with some friends. I wouldn’t be surprised if my Discord chat history was unavailable in a decade, so IRC is a nice option to run on the side. There’s value in simplicity, and I admit the risk of sounding like a tech hipster.
IRC has no chat history either, right. I get the simplicity of IRC but searchable history is a bonus for Discord. As long as the service is available, searching is kinda possible. With irc you have to find out which bot provides history, which is then usually split over multiple files
My client dies the logging, and I can e.g. grep decade old logs. I’m not sure if you can get same level of access to Discord logs (=export them). I guess Discord bot that logs everything as a historian is a partial solution (I guess log bot cannot catch DMs).
Also see https://oftc.net/, where a bunch of older-school development projects hang out. (That's where the Xen Project moved to after freenode imploded, before eventually switching to Matrix.)
I remember back in the day I wouldn't even check the listings, just joining whatever #topic or #hobby or #software and finding it filled with people almost always.
Right, I can go to insert mode, but to leave is, tricky. I found going to replace mode and escape worked in FF. I'm sure its a browser issue, I also have vimium so probably a nightmare of hooks!
Have you tried with <Control-Left Square Bracket>? aka Ctrl-[, or ^[, as seen sometimes in the terminal. This works for me in most terminals as an alternative to Escape when using vi/vim.
In mobile (at least in mine, firefox) the input become buferred autocomplete and when accepted via return, the typed word gets duplicated before entered. Workaround is to accept via space and delete as necessary
Hey Alessandro - I'm a huge fan of WebVM + y'all's other work at Leaning Tech.
Curious - is your implementation of how you wrangled lwIP for the networking piece open source? I had previously read the article you linked elsewhere, re: networking, but would love to see the specifics of your approach there.
All the components of the network stack are open source: namely the Tailscale go client and the lwip networking stack. Some (not fully trivial) glue code is also required, which is not currently published. We do plan to cleanup the stack and release it as one of our upcoming internship projects.
I tested in Firefox on Linux. It works well except:
1. Copy and paste does not work and this could be bad for basically every editing task (programming etc).
2. The screen freezes sometimes and keypresses don't appear. Usually pressing backspace unfreezes the screen. Firefox about:performance doesn't show any CPU usage in the tab. Linux's htop (on my machine) doesn't show anything strange with Firefox.
And a question: I saw that new files persist after closing the tab and opening it again. I didn't investigate my localstorage etc with Developer Tools. Did you use that or some other browser feature? How truly persistent are those files?
1. Support for traditional copy/paste shortcuts is problematic, since Ctrl-C is interpreted as the SIGINT signal. Copying via the mouse menu should work. Pasting is supported via Ctrl+Shift+V.
To answer you question: filesystem chunks are cached/persisted using a local IndexedDB. It provides a fairly strong level of persistence, although the user can wipe it out of course.
Copy&paste via menu works (I didn't think about it) and Ctrl+Shift+V works too. Ctrl+Shift+C opens Firefox's Developer Tools. It's difficult to find a reasonable shortcut.
You want it to be 3D!! Loading this is a multiplayer social VR sandboxed WebXR environment would be so amazing one day! I wonder if it could all run off-thread in a Worker and one day maybe use webGPU to update textures async! I hope computers can be fun and care free like a game one day and AI companions will let people learn and do anything! Thanks for working to make this!
Hello there, I havent tried webvm yet but looks similar to v86. There were lot of network related challenges working with v86, for eg. You cant do curl, DNS resolution does not work out of the box. How did you address these challenges in webvm. I think it is very interesting and exciting what you guys are building.
Could it be possible to run containers within this environment?
I ask because I personally think we are headed towards a future where web browsers are just sandboxed container environments where we download and run containers for each app...
Eventually, even calling them "web" browsers might feel a little odd, almost the way in which we "dial" a phone number today, even though we now mostly key it in on a touch screen.
Well, the environment itself is a container. Supporting Linux "namespaces" used to implement containers is also a possibility.
As described in the project README we provide a GitHub Action workflow to convert Dockerfiles into bootable images for WebVM: https://github.com/leaningtech/webvm
Even better, consider joining our Discord: https://discord.gg/yTNZgySKGa