Granted, but there is a gulf of difference between That Which Is Provably Possible and That Which Works In Practice. Important changes to the tech landscape rarely have to do with someone doing something that was theoretically impossible before. They are usually about someone noticing that something that was previously *impractical* is now reasonable.
I mean, Javascript's always been Turing-complete in theory, and it's always been hypothetically possible to do this -- if you had an impossibly fast machine, an impossible amount of memory space and an at least implausibly fast network connection. Knowing that you can *actually* do stuff like this, though, on a consumer-grade machine, is a whole different ballgame.
And yes, it's a somewhat silly project, but the author explicitly did it as an exploration of what you could accomplish with current Javascript tech. (The project was mainly the PC emulator, actually; then he simply compiled Linux to that emulator and wrote a few bindings.) In that light, it's pretty interesting, and firmly cements the "Javascript is best thought of as machine code" viewpoint, IMO...
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2014-05-06 02:42 pm (UTC)I mean, Javascript's always been Turing-complete in theory, and it's always been hypothetically possible to do this -- if you had an impossibly fast machine, an impossible amount of memory space and an at least implausibly fast network connection. Knowing that you can *actually* do stuff like this, though, on a consumer-grade machine, is a whole different ballgame.
And yes, it's a somewhat silly project, but the author explicitly did it as an exploration of what you could accomplish with current Javascript tech. (The project was mainly the PC emulator, actually; then he simply compiled Linux to that emulator and wrote a few bindings.) In that light, it's pretty interesting, and firmly cements the "Javascript is best thought of as machine code" viewpoint, IMO...