Hi Daniel, > On Wed, Apr 09, 2025 at 03:21:15PM -0400, Stefan Hajnoczi wrote: > > On Mon, Apr 07, 2025 at 11:45:51PM +0900, Kohei Tokunaga wrote: > > > This patch series enables QEMU's system emulator to run in a browser using > > > Emscripten. > > > It includes implementations and workarounds to address browser environment > > > limitations, as shown in the following. > > > > I think it would be great to merge this even if there are limitations > > once code review comments have been addressed. Developing WebAssembly > > support in-tree is likely to allow this effort to develop further than > > if done in personal repos (and with significant efforts required to > > rebase the code periodically). > > It is certainly impressive & clever but first two critical questions.. > > Is there a committment to long term (many years) development & maintenance > of this, or is it just a short term experiment which will have attention > dwindle in a year's time ? > > Is there a compelling real world use case for this that will justify > carrying it in QEMU, or is it a case of "it exists because it can" ?
Thank you for the qeustions. In recent years, I've observed several use cases for on-browser VM environments. One potential application is an on-browser development environment, similar to VSCode's on-browser Python execution environment [1], but with QEMU offering enhanced compatibility for existing software Another use case could be an on-browser playground or demo environment. Several programming languages, such as Ruby [2] and Swift [3], have already leveraged WebAssembly for this purpose. On-browser QEMU would extend this capability, allowing a wider variety of software to run within browsers. Although the current Wasm backend implementation is still in its early stages and has room for improvement (e.g., the aforementioned workarounds, performance, etc.), I believe the examples above represent promising use cases. Of course, I am committed to maintaining and improving this backend. [1] https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/python/python-web [2] https://github.com/ruby/ruby.wasm/blob/d4a9a03aae6b84327d29783b75edb63549df7e6c/README.md#try-rubywasm-no-installation-needed [3] https://swiftwasm.org/
