Windows 2000 emulated in WebAssembly

BELLARD.ORG

This is without a doubt one of the most awesome WebAssembly demos we’ve seen so far, a fully-functional Windows 2000 emulator! This is the creation of Fabrice Bellard who has created a number of emulators over the years. This one originally used emscripten to generate asm.js, the recent move to wasm has boosted performance.

As you can image, the twitter-verse loved this, with most people heading straight for minesweeper or pinball. Even more amazing is that the emulator has network access, allowing you to see that Google still supports IE5 and run Firefox 12 (within Firefox 61).

Of course there were many of the obligatory references to Gary Bernhardt’s Birth & Death of JavaScript talk, which does seem to be quite accurate in its predictions. If you’ve not seen that presentation before, stop what you are doing and watch it right now!

Chrome Introduces LiftOff

BLOGSPOT.ORG

Ideally the techniques that are used to compile and execute WebAssembly (and JavaScript) have to compile quickly, giving fast start-up times, but also be optimised so that the code runs as quickly as possible. Achieving both of these aims, fast compilation and execution, is a challenge, with the two goals often being in conflict. This blog post describes a new baseline compiler for Chrome called LiftOff, that dramatically reduces the initial compilation. Following this, the current TurboFan compile ‘kicks in’, to boost the runtime performance.

FrogUI

LESARDE.COM<s/mall>

FrogUI is a new framework that brings C#, and the WPF style of UI development, to the web. It looks like Blazor has some competition!

And Finally …

Who needs Blazor, when you can run C# within the Windows 2000 emulator?