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From: tlaronde@polynum.com
To: 9fans <9fans@9fans.net>
Subject: [9fans] Plan9 and Inferno and the JS VM
Date: Tue, 17 Nov 2020 15:06:10 +0100	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <20201117140610.GA17186@polynum.com> (raw)

Fabrice Bellard has developed a VM in JavaScript (!!!) allowing to
run an OS in a browser. See: https://bellard.org/jslinux/

This was brought to my attention by a teacher wanting to teach TeX and
litterate programming to students without the need for them to install
anything. This is done for kerTeX see:

http://kertex.kergis.com/en/jslinux.html

What can be the use of this? First, for this very kind of usage 
(allowing an audience to use software without requiring installation)
or for demonstration purposes (instead of trial CDROM for example).

But since what is lost by the emulation can be compensated by changing
the OS, it could perhaps be tempting for someone to try to put plan9 on
the VM (I don't speak about kerTeX; just as a general responsiveness
comparison).

And furthermore, since Inferno, for the very superficial view I have
about it---I spent a very sparse time on Plan9 but never managed to
get to Inferno---, was designed if I'm not mistaken, to be able
with a small memory footprint to do what was done, long ago, with
Java applets, it could be tempting, in this area of teaching being
done at a distance, to compare the speed and the responsiveness of
Inferno vs JS---if Inferno can accept apps not only with its language
but in pure C too, I can probably make kerTeX work on it too.

Just my 2cents.
-- 
        Thierry Laronde <tlaronde +AT+ polynum +dot+ com>
                     http://www.kergis.com/
                    http://kertex.kergis.com/
                       http://www.sbfa.fr/
Key fingerprint = 0FF7 E906 FBAF FE95 FD89  250D 52B1 AE95 6006 F40C

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             reply	other threads:[~2020-11-17 14:06 UTC|newest]

Thread overview: 5+ messages / expand[flat|nested]  mbox.gz  Atom feed  top
2020-11-17 14:06 tlaronde [this message]
2020-11-17 15:35 ` hiro
2020-11-17 17:08   ` tlaronde
2020-11-17 15:42 ` Pouya Tafti
2020-11-17 17:09   ` tlaronde

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