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Simon Willison Profile picture
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Feb 2 • 7 tweets • 3 min read
Whoa. webvm.io runs a full Debian VM entirely in your browser via WebAssembly... and it ships with working Perl, Python, Ruby and Node.js!
It has gcc too! This works:

gcc -o helloworld examples/c/helloworld.c

And it looks like there's a virtual filesystem that stores state in your browser
Combine this with:

- JupyterLite jupyterlite.readthedocs.io/en/latest/_sta…
- SQLime sqlime.org

And it looks like one of the killer apps of WebAssembly is providing 100% safe and reliable teaching environments for people who are just getting started learning complex technologies
Watching webvm.io load is interesting - it only needs loads 5.65MB to get to the interactive bash prompt, but any time you run other commands it fetches more data as it reads from the remote read-only filesystem

It loads another 5.37MB to get a Python 2 prompt
Looks like the tech underpinning this isn't open source (yet?) leaningtech.com/cheerpx/
Here's an open source project that may be able to achieve a similar thing
If you're interested in more examples of interesting applications of WebAssembly my blog now has 16 items under the WebAssembly tag, going back to 2018 simonwillison.net/tags/webassemb…

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More from @simonw

Simon Willison Profile picture
Jan 12
Want to know the secret to blogging more often?

Lower your standards!

A post which you don't think is ready yet is a LOT better than a giant folder full of drafts that no-one ever gets to see

(Your readers won't ever know how good the thing you wanted to write would have been)
I like to apply this classic Reid Hoffman startup/product advice to my writing, because the alternative is basically never publishing anything at all
One of the biggest productivity improvements I ever made to my blogging was when I gave up on my desire to finish everything with a sparkling conclusion that ties together the whole post

Now I embrace abruptly ending when I've run out of things to say instead
Read 5 tweets
Simon Willison Profile picture
Jan 11
I've been solving so many documentation problems with @nedbat's cog tool recently - it's fantastic for keeping documentation automatically up-to-date, in Markdown or rST)

Here's a new page of sqlite-utils docs showing --help for every CLI command! sqlite-utils.datasette.io/en/latest/cli-… Partial screenshot of that ...
And here's how it works - I have a cog code block embedded in the .rst file which iterates through the commands and calls --help on each one, then writes the output to the page:
github.com/simonw/sqlite-… .. contents:: :local: .. [...
Final trick: my GitHub Actions test.yml file calls "cog --check docs/*.rst" to confirm that the cog scripts have been run

If the test fails, I can run "cog -r docs/*.rst" to execute them, then commit the result. github.com/simonw/sqlite-…
Read 7 tweets
Simon Willison Profile picture
Jan 11
What’s new in sqlite-utils - annotated release notes for my SQLite Python utility library and CLI tool, v3.20 and v3.21 simonwillison.net/2022/Jan/11/sq…
A bunch of powerful new features in these releases.

The new --convert option to "sqlite-utils insert" lets you run a Python conversion function against data you are importing from JSON or CSV - and --lines lets you import raw lines of code (e.g. from log files) too
Combining the new --text option with --convert lets you load in a full unstructured/semi-structured file in one go and use a Python fragment to parse it into a list of dictionaries which then get inserted into a table
Read 8 tweets
Simon Willison Profile picture
Jan 11
Wow, more bills like this one please!
If you're interested in FARA I have a Datasette instance that uses data from the latest released CSV files running here fara.datasettes.com
I'm also running a Git scraper against FARA - here's the latest commit from four hours ago github.com/simonw/fara-hi…
Read 4 tweets
Simon Willison Profile picture
Jan 10
This made me think about my sqlite-utils Python package: pypi.org/project/sqlite…

It works as both a CLI tool and a Python library, and has a small number of dependencies

I want "pip install sqlite-utils" to do the "right thing" - but what's the right thing?
If you are using it as a CLI tool I want it to to be guaranteed to work - if you install it you should get known tested versions of those dependencies
But... if you are using it as a library I want to let you make your own decision about those dependencies - if you want to use a more recent release of one of them you should be able to do that

If I explicitly pin to tested versions will that break your ability to upgrade them?
Read 7 tweets
Simon Willison Profile picture
Jan 9
TIL numeric tweet IDs these days exceed the maximum safe integer value for JavaScript, which is:

9007199254740991

A recent tweet of mine had ID:

1480304129792643072

Anyone know when that tipping point was reached?
I spend most of my time in Python and SQLite which don't have this limitation so I'm only just catching on
This is actually covered in the Twitter API docs: developer.twitter.com/en/docs/twitte…

"Numbers as large as 64-bits can cause issues with programming languages that represent integers with fewer than 64-bits. An example of this is JavaScript, where integers are limited to 53-bits in size." Numbers as large as 64-bits...
Read 5 tweets

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