The StackBlitz company blog announces and explains WebContainers, which run Node.js in the browser, along with related web tooling news.
HN links it for WebContainers announcements and technical posts on browser support, WebAssembly and sandboxing, mainly as background for the product.
This is made by StackBlitz (not really, see reply to this comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29812650 ) who make a Cloud IDE that runs in the browser instead of a server. As for the why of that see https://blog.stackblitz.com/posts/introducing-webcontainers/ "What about Code Spaces/Sandbox/Repls/...?
Legacy online IDEs run your entire dev environment on a remote server and stream the results back across the internet to your browser. The problem with this approach is that it yields few security benefits and provides a worse experience than your local machine in nearly every way: it takes minutes to spin up containers, is prone to network latency, cannot work offline, often results in network timeouts, debugging frozen/broken containers is nearly impossible, and hitting refresh just reconnects you to the broken container again."
This is also sandboxed FWIW. It means users could write plugins in Python and have them run securely, much like browsers running JavaScript, and games that have Lua scripting.
https://webassembly.org/docs/security/ https://www.reddit.com/r/WebAssembly/comments/ryz2zz/are_wasm_binaries_still_vulnerable_from_memory/
Deno also touts its permission system. It will be interesting to see if both get interesting use.
micropip is impressive. A lot of JavaScript dev still depends heavily on Node, to the point that only one browser-based build tool exists that can handle most projects and they're keeping it proprietary: https://blog.stackblitz.com/posts/introducing-webcontainers/
> is it "ECMAScript API of new open source WASM-based POSIX-style browser OS"
This is closer to what the Bytecode Alliance is looking to do with WASI, which we're playing a small (but crucial) part in: https://blog.stackblitz.com/posts/bytecode-alliance/
> Does "WebContainer API" mean "proprietary web service for accessing npm and git over http"?
Kinda, we have plans to allow self hosting and more reg open source- more to come!
This looks a LOT like StackBlitz WebContainers which were launched last month.
https://blog.stackblitz.com/posts/introducing-webcontainers/
Is this using WebContainers? Or is it just very similar?
The HN discussion about StackBlitz focused on the problem that it would only work in Chrome… I assume that's true here as well? (Due to lack of the File System Access API?) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27223012
I assume their goals are similar to the "WebContainers" project [0] they link to.
- development environment with a browser as only requirement
- easily shareable development environment
- fast to "boot" environment
However, as I read both pages I'm not sure what benefits Browser-vite offers over WebContainers.
[0] https://blog.stackblitz.com/posts/introducing-webcontainers/
hi HN, there's a companion technical post by yours truly which might be more appropriate/technically dense for your taste:
https://blog.stackblitz.com/posts/supporting-firefox/
(I'm also sad that Multi-Account Containers are not a thing in Firefox for Android).
Disclaimer: I (obviously) work for StackBlitz.