[Self-interest] OurSelf.io April update - TerminalMorph!

[Steve Dekorte]

Would it be possible to disable Self’s JIT and just compile the C++ to WASM Emcripten:

	https://github.com/emscripten-core/emscripten

 and then run Self with just its interpreter?

Btw, here’s a project that’s tinkering with JITs within WASM:

	https://github.com/wingo/wasm-jit

Besides the other advantages of Self over JS, it would be interesting to compare the performance of Self-on-WASM to JS in the browser. IIRC, JS has mostly moved to optimizing the use of its interpreter as mobile platforms like iOS don’t allow native JITs.

It might also be neat to see JS running on top of Self/WASM, sort of like the Smalltalk or Java implementations on top of Self...


> On Nov 28, 2022, at 1:42 PM, Russell Allen <mail at russell-allen.com> wrote:
> 
> Yes, that's basically right. I'm using a X11->vnc->canvas_vnc_client pathway because it exists and works, but longer term I'd love to cut out X and just have a Self vnc server (or some higher level protocol)
> 
> Running Self directly in the browser under WASM would be very attractive because it would tackle the issue of GUI latency which is probably a more important issue for development than raw VM speed at the moment. 
> 
> Presumably it would also make the system more scalable by reducing OurSelf.io server requirements, but that's not really an issue yet :)
> 
> I suspect we're talking about writing a new Self VM - is a port of the existing VM to WASM even theoretically possible? Can you write a JIT in WASM? Maybe SqueakJS could be altered to run Self. 
> 
> But either way it requires a fair amount of work.
> 
> Russell
> 
> Steve Dekorte wrote:
> 
> 
>> Hi Russell,
>> 
>> OurSelf.io looks like an interesting project. As I understand it, you launch a Self instance on a server within a FreeBSD container and then do screen sharing to that instance within a canvas element (and some JS code) in the browser. Is that correct?
>> 
>> Has anyone considered the possibility of porting Self to WASM so it could be run directly in the browser?
>> 
>> Steve
>>