Hacker News Reader

Given how much effort it is to compile and maintain 200 different compilers just for Ubuntu (not to mention some closed-source compilers), this probably is not as simple as you'd think :-)

Are you suggesting running the compilers in the browser?

But not bare-metal browser (BmB), on Linux of course.

https://bellard.org/jslinux/

So, transpile 8GB of compiler binaries to JavaScript which will inflate it to ~80GB. Now it’s a bandwidth problem.

That is highly exaggerated. Most Linux distributions don't even have such size.

Also, most users don't need support for all languages.

> highly exaggerated

The article says 8GB of compiler binaries, asm.js in my experience is 10x the size of the original binary.

Obviously not everyone needs to download every compiler but even spreading that number between a few hundered compilers means 200+ mb JavaScript downloads.

Am I wrong?