Theseus: Translating Win32 to WASM

(neugierig.org)

36 points | by ingve 2 days ago

9 comments

  • modeless 5 minutes ago
    Seems like Theseus is not using OffscreenCanvas yet. Should be a good fit for something that runs off the main thread. Graphics can be rendered from a background worker thread directly to the screen without the involvement of the main thread at all.

    https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/OffscreenCa...

  • hardwaresofton 21 minutes ago
    If you’re poking around WASM consider falling down the Component Model rabbit hole:

    https://github.com/WebAssembly/component-model/blob/main/des...

    Threading is actively being worked on right now (to be released in 0.3.x, soon), and some changes just made their way into LLVM as well:

    https://github.com/llvm/llvm-project/pull/175800

  • Findecanor 10 minutes ago
    When I clicked, I thought this was going to be about the Theseus operating system [0]. Running win32 programs on it would have been ... interesting.

    It too uses WASM, but for running non-Rust programs in sandboxes. Everything else is Rust. Hmm.. Last updated in 2024 though.

    0: https://github.com/theseus-os/Theseus

  • mickael-kerjean 1 hour ago
    It's refreshing to see those kind of projects coming back on HN. Pretty awesome to see your example (https://evmar.github.io/theseus/) fit in about 1MB when a lot of those wasm projects can be super heavy (like libreoffice which is 50MB after brotli compression)
  • arka2147483647 19 minutes ago
    I miss the days when this would just have been named win2wasm.

    These branded projects become difficult to remember when everything has a random non-mnemonic name.

  • Aurornis 1 hour ago
    Seeing minesweeper recompiled to run in the browser is awesome.

    The pain points about threading in the browser and debugging wasm are the two problems I ran into on another project. I hope we can get some improvements in both areas because wasm would be a lot easier to work with if developers didn't have to fight both of those topics.

  • valorzard 1 hour ago
    I also tried doing multithreaded wasm in Rust, and I got some weiiiiird errors. Definitely not stable yet.
  • theanonymousone 1 hour ago
    This is a big deal when/if it's working, to me at least. Where can I contribute?
  • gigel82 40 minutes ago
    An interesting learning project, but not actually usable.

    https://github.com/danoon2/Boxedwine looks interesting in this space, but unfortunately it can't really run anything remotely modern in practice (though if you're looking at 20th century Windows software it will likely be capable of running it).