Persistent.info is the blog of the developer behind Infinite Mac, which runs classic Mac OS in the browser via emulators.
HN links it for technical write-ups on Infinite Mac. Commenters call the project very cool, noting its Cloudflare-based AppleTalk networking.
This conversation went on a tangent. It started off with people complaining about modern GUIs then moved onto Outlook and then someone rushes to blame JavaScript / Electron. JS runs 50-80% as fast as native, which is more than fast enough thanks to Moore's law, for virtually any GUI application. The web has a reputation for being slow, thanks to a traditional lack of GPU acceleration as well as 25 years of legacy code attached to its Document Object Model, that are pretty gnarly for browser vendors to deal with. That has nothing to do with JS itself.
JS can run full GPU accelerated graphics with WebGL (and soon WebGPU), with shaders, complex geometries, textures, etc at 60 FPS: https://threejs.org/examples/#webgl_animation_keyframes.
The MacOS 9 demo as shown, is impressive, but it is far from optimized, given that it is a side project. But it's impressive all the same that it's emulating a full Mac environment in the browser. Read the developer's own comments on it: https://blog.persistent.info/2022/03/blog-post.html
There aren't many VMs that can run in browser
https://copy.sh/v86/
https://webvm.io/
https://bellard.org/jslinux/
https://jamesfriend.com.au/pce-js/ (https://github.com/jsdf/pce)
https://www.pcjs.org/ (lots of hardware and OSes) (https://github.com/jeffpar/pcjs)
Mac OS
https://infinitemac.org/ (https://blog.persistent.info/2023/03/infinitemac-dot-org.html)
https://jamesfriend.com.au/projects/basiliskii/BasiliskII-worker.html
https://jamesfriend.com.au/pce-js/pce-js-apps/
Creator of the site here. There's a blog post with the technical details if you're curious about how it works and whose work it builds on: https://blog.persistent.info/2022/03/blog-post.html
There are also a couple of variants that boot either System 7.5.3 or KanjiTalk 7.5.3 (the Japanese version of MacOS): https://system7.app/ and https://kanjitalk7.app/
HFS+. Searching for 'git osx performance' turns up these:
- http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3313908/git-is-really-slow-for-100-000-objects-any-fixes
- http://lists-archives.com/git/652294-git-performance-on-os-x.html
- http://blog.persistent.info/2010/12/making-git-faster-on-large-repositories.html
According to https://blog.persistent.info/2022/03/blog-post.html it is emulator.
Note, the Mac OS and the apps in this emulator are running proprietary code. So it can't be "compiled" because the source code isn't available. The only options are binary recompiling or binary translating or emulation.
https://infinitemac.org/ is an example of a good use: users can try out old versions of Mac OS, to see what's changed and what software used to be available for old versions. It doesn't use JSLinux, but other emulators [1]
[1] https://blog.persistent.info/2025/03/infinite-mac-os-x.html