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Discussion on: What would a JavaScript Wasm desktop be like?

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Adam Crockett 🌀 • Edited

Node and Wasm is on par with Wasm in browser but with the added benefit of full FS access and multithreading for the guest language. The guest language could be a port of a pre-existing native lib, heck it could even be java native or dart. The apps provide the UI, the ported lib provides the functionality. For those not wanting to create a new UI, Qt now exists in Wasm and gtk has a web backend.

I am actually writing this thing at the moment. The display server is nw.js and the apps are iot.js procceses (node on a diet) each app weights 512kb! And each app can spawn webviews for thier ui, between all of the processes is a TCP server.

Only time will tell if the idea is a good one. Through this development I am keeping my frameworks to a minimum and making the process of making an app fairly open to developer interpretation. Flutter may be a great thing to support as well. But that's going to need more collaboration. I am making the basic working desktop and sticking this in a Ubuntu core distro. We will see where it goes.