[nteon]

I'm one of the authors - its so exciting to see continued interest here!

The biggest problem with Browsix today stems from Spectre mitigations: Shared Array Buffers aren't enabled by default in browsers, and static hosting sites like GitHub Pages don't let you set the right COOP/COEP ( https://web.dev/coop-coep/ ) headers to get them enabled AFAICT.

Additionally, Browsix hasn't been updated in a while, although I still believe the idea is sound. I don't have a lot of time for Browsix these days, but it would be straightforward to update Browsix with WASI support which would free us from having to use a modified Emscripten toolchain (and instantly enable running Rust binaries under Browsix).

[edit]: for additional context: we use Shared Array Buffers to give the kernel and program a shared view of a process's address space to enable fast system calls between Web Workers and the kernel (running in the main browser thread/context). Without them performance is unacceptably slow, as things like read/write system calls (a) require several memcpys and (b) create a bunch of JS garbage. Additionally, without them there isn't a good way to "block" handling a syscall in a WebWorker (which we need to do for non-event-loop C/C++/Rust programs).

[Ralo]

Weirdly enough, I was complaining about this exact issue this week. You can setup COOP/COEP in Github pages but you are still restricted to same domain for all resources. Which may or may not work in your case.

I've been working on a modified Emscripten runtime that treats threads as separate "programs" with their own memory, etc. Not an optimal solution at all but sometimes you need to hack your way around a problem.

[nteon]

How did you get COOP/COEP in Github pages? A quick search just now suggested it might be possible with a Service Worker[0], with the caveat that it may only work on _second_ load.

0 - https://dev.to/stefnotch/enabling-coop-coep-without-touching...

[Ralo]

That was basically it, not a great solution.

[vgb2k18]

If I'm reading this right, it means Shared Array Buffers can get enabled by sites that are not GitHub Pages, eg, by spinning up one's preferred cloud hosting instance (DO AWS Azure etc). If yes, then this appears in my mind as not a huge problem.

[rezonant]

Also at least for Chrome the limitations are delayed until Chrome 103 if I read this right. See update at the top of https://developer.chrome.com/blog/enabling-shared-array-buff...

Chrome stable is at 97 currently.

[pjmlp]

Yeah, 10 years later and all these Flash killers keep not having the tooling offered by it, while the workarounds to deal with security are so bothersome that in the end everyone ends up doing mobile native apps instead.

[quasarj]

It said I needed Firefox Nightly, so I installed it, and it still doesn't work. How do I enable Shared Array Buffers? Google is no help..