How exactly is this different from something like v86? It's definitely easier to embed but also not as customizable. Like if I don't need bioinformatics stuff, can I just exclude that?
Yes it's powered by v86! I just wanted it to be easier to embed and come pre-built with lots of bioinformatics tools. You don't actually have to exclude the bioinformatics tools because v86 doesn't actually load tools unless you call them on the command-line. But when you embed, you can also preload the tools you will use so they load faster the first time they're called.
The use case is for tutorials and documentation pages. sandbox.bio embeds that terminal in all its bioinformatics tutorials and people find it useful to have an environment where you don't need to set anything up before you start learning. So I wanted to make it easy for others to embed a similar environment in their training materials.
I don't think there is much use to it other than fun little gimmick.
To that end, I could see it being sort of fun to run like "ls" and see the list of post categories, then do like "ls posts/" to see all the general posts, then "cat posts/i-am-a-post.txt" to read the post.
A few weeks ago, I came across a blog post with 5 git tips. I would have loved having an embedded terminal with some mock repos preloaded with the exact situation. That's the kind of use case I'm aiming at, not just the basic commands!
To that end, I could see it being sort of fun to run like "ls" and see the list of post categories, then do like "ls posts/" to see all the general posts, then "cat posts/i-am-a-post.txt" to read the post.
In fact it appears that this post was subject to an upvote ring to quickly reach the front page with little of value in itself.
So I am very suspect of this post.
Is it a actual Linux kernel + filesystem under the hood?
Or did you just use the standard utilities compiled for wasm,
how does network access work (assume it doesn't because of coors)
Can you run non-wasm programs? How do entry points work - what about ctrl-c and interrupts for long running programs.
You do not discuss any of this and it seems half baked.
(This coming from someone who has explored how to do this for a vscode in browser editor playground)