On 17/05/2011 23:22, nemesis wrote:
> Fabrice Bellard, head of funky projects like FFmpeg and QEMU, wrote a
> 486 emulator in javascript and put a simplified Linux to run on it.

My mind is still blown by this. The author casually chats about it as if 
emulating something as over-complicated as an IA32 CPU is in some way 
"easy".

Apparently the reason it requires a modern browser is that it uses 
"typed arrays", a newish JS feature that let you manipulate arbitrary 
binary data in memory (somewhat) efficiently. The Linux distro is 
apparently BusyBox, together with a toy C99 compiler written by the 
author of the emulator.

His other projects include an online scientific calculator with graphing 
mode...

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