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

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emptyother profile image
emptyother

It would probably take as much ram as KDE (sorry I didn't find a more up-to-date article) because of Electron, but thats it. No different than having various framework libraries pre-loaded. And I assume WebAssembly is gonna become faster as it becomes popular and more people start working on improving it and its tools. We got our editors in js, our terminals in js, and more and more apps built in js, so I would not be surprised if we soon got a desktop environment built in js.

Related: I was thinking the other day when I read about JS' new pipe operator.. One could extend Node REPL to be a js-driven OS shell (I'm not talking about a terminal, btw). Something like PowerShell but instead of passing C# objects, it passes JS objects. And some features to navigate the file system, and to make normal executables and js modules and functions to work better together.

Depends on how much need the world has for writing shell scripts in JS.

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adam_cyclones profile image
Adam Crockett 🌀

Well I was curious too so I tried nwjs and it appears to be much lighter. 72 off the bat, that gives me a little room to play with.

Npm or yarn could serve as a package manager as well. I wonder if I focus on a DE first it might turn into a full distro. One things for sure, I want to make this developer focused and get a community going.

I had some ideas about gtk as well, Broadway gtk 3 lets you run gtk apps in a browser, what if for backwards compatibility, I allowed webviews in a window that launched a gtk app. I'm this close to getting some Ubuntu core and trying to write a prototype.

In terms of terminals I really like your idea, if you release something when pipelines are a thing come back and show me. I had planned to use xterm.js or the aforementioned Broadway compatibility layer.

This project could be bloody interesting.