Windows 95 in Electron

https://github.com/felixrieseberg/windows95

by modinfo • 4 years ago

137 80 4 years ago

github.com

marcodiego• 4 years ago

I'd be more impressed by Electron in Windows 95 or DOS. This would allow modern software on ancient OS's.

EDIT: Of course, the project IS impressive. Never wanted to demote it.

timw4mail• 4 years ago

Quite unlikely to happen, though. The Chromium project is quite unfriendly to legacy platforms.

StevePerkins• 4 years ago

Hacker News is the worst. You could kill yourself for two years on personal project, that is a towering achievement of innovation and technical accomplishment, and the Show HN thread will fixate on the font kerning in your announcement blog post.

AshamedCaptain• 4 years ago

I would bet that by porting a x86 emulator to electron it actually runs on _less_ platforms than native x86 emulators. I mean, emulators are practically one of the most ported software and as a consequence one of the most portable software overall.

bluedino• 4 years ago

Good luck. Windows 95 (despite it's best attempt at being a "32-bit" OS) has a limit of somewhere < 512MB of RAM.

ben_w• 4 years ago

I’m old enough to remember jokes about it when it was new: "Windows 95: a 32 bit shell for a 16 bit patch for an 8 bit OS originally written for a 4 bit processor by a 2 bit company that can’t stand 1 bit of competition".

gtk40• 4 years ago

There are some fairly recent versions of Gecko that have been backported to Windows 95. I played around with RetroZilla a few years ago on Windows 95 and was able to get many modern sites to work. The K-Meleon project has even more recent work in this regard. It'd probably be easier to start with Gecko for this work than Chromium.

creativenolo• 4 years ago

If everyone would stop shipping on electron I could carry around 1 floppy disk per app rather than the 100+ for each electron app.

seanw444• 4 years ago

Maybe I'm just going insane, but I have extreme deja vu about this comment and its replies. Did this post and its comments get refreshed or something to look new? I swear I read all of these verbatim a while ago.

lioeters• 4 years ago

I've had the same sense of deja vu on various topics, like Electron. I'm pretty sure the HN crowd revisits favorite themes regularly, and repeats basically the same arguments back and forth, usually adding new information or ideas on every iteration.

rvnx• 4 years ago

In the README it says in a trolling way "should it have been a native app?" but actually it's not a bad concept at all. The reason to use Electron is to not have to take care of app portability and also to limit the number of expensive C++ developers you need to hire. That's also why doing a mobile website / Progressive Web App / Bundled Web App is a hack that makes sense, though the "right" way is to develop a native app with one or two additional developers (which is absurd, because then you have roadmaps that get out of sync between platforms).

Hardware is cheap, especially when you are not the one paying for it. Engineers are expensive for your company.

rahen• 4 years ago

I'm not sure if you're trolling or not, but I'm thinking the same for my fictive automotive manufacturing corporation. Engineers are expensive; I'd rather quickly cobble up something with chinesium parts that somewhat rolls and gets 50MPG with a terrible safety record, so I can transfer the costs to society. Gas and insurance policies are cheap, especially if you're not the one paying for them. Engineers are not.

Let's do the same with aircraft and software and everything else and see how things turn out.

djbusby• 4 years ago

It's maybe trolling.

Hardware is cheap, especially when you are not the one paying for it. Engineers are expensive for your company.

This is true and MBAs love to put the costs somewhere else. The software only has to work well enough for my next bonus and line item on my CV.

hansworst• 4 years ago

We absolutely do this, in every possible industry. The first cars weren't anywhere near the efficiency they have today, and the ones we have today aren't anywhere near theoretical max efficiency either.

In the real world, you always have to make a tradeoff between delivering some value now and delivering the maximum theoretical value at some potentially non-existent point in the future. And after some time, throwing more money at the problem won't increase the value output by that same amount, and so you have to accept that your product is imperfect, but still adds some value.

Add to that some market mechanisms that exist in the software world, where it's often better to move fast and capture a large share of the market than to polish your product and be left with no users. And suddenly building your app with Electron doesn't seem so bad from the point of view of someone who just wants to solve their users' problems.

If the app turns out to add real value, you can always polish it later and do a rewrite in assembly. If it doesn't, at least you didn't spend five years writing that chat app when you could have done something more interesting.

itsoktocry• 4 years ago

Engineers are expensive; I'd rather quickly cobble up something with chinesium parts that somewhat rolls and gets 50MPG with a terrible safety record

You should read about JB Straubel's experience hacking together some of the first Tesla prototypes in the garage.

You're not really saving on engineering costs. Parts you intend to break, sure, but it's not easy to cobble together.

mrtesthah• 4 years ago

Let's do the same with aircraft and software and everything else and see how things turn out.

Exactly. Who needs a quality steak when you’ve got McDonald’s around the corner? So much cheaper, too. In fact let’s just replace all restaurants with McDonald’s. It makes a profit so it must not be wrong.

TheAceOfHearts• 4 years ago

You're joking, but I've read that's not far off from how a lot of modern car manufacturing works. The development of most parts gets outsourced to various companies and the car company just assembles everything. I learned about this in an interview which claimed that Tesla was bucking the outsourcing trend by increasingly inhousing more and more car parts in order to have a greater competitive advantage.

simias• 4 years ago

I'm not sure I understand what it is exactly, the page mentions QEMU so I assume it's emulating a PC and booting Windows on it? So does it mean that they've compiled QEMU for a Javascript target and packaged it in Electron?

If so, does it mean that it's a generic PC emulator in electron that can run any kind of PC-compatible software, including other OS?

jchw5• 4 years ago

It’s based on v86, so yeah, pretty much.

https://github.com/copy/v86

ape4• 4 years ago

Wow, its based on v86 which "emulates an x86-compatible CPU and hardware. Machine code is translated to WebAssembly modules at runtime in order to achieve decent performance."

el_oni• 4 years ago

This is great, can you install other software on it?

If so it would be actually quite useful in science where old computers are used because of old software used to run old instruments. The old GC-FID i used during my PhD ran on windows 95. If that software could run on electron they could actually get some modern hardware to run those old machines

mysterydip3• 4 years ago

You can already run win95 under several different emulators (pcem, dosbox-x to name two).

mysterydip3• 4 years ago

Fun project! Recommended RAM to run Windows 95 was 8MB, curious to find out how much this uses to emulate everything around the OS.

mherrmann• 4 years ago

2GB for Electron, 8MB for Windows.

jchw5• 4 years ago

Just ran it to find out. On my machine, about 292 MiB, with the default machine, which seems to give about 128 MiB to the VM. That's measured using the sum of private working sets of all processes, since Electron/Chromium is multi-process.

This actually doesn't seem like such a bad outcome, though, I don't know how it will scale if you increase the amount of RAM available to the VM.

AndrewThrowaway4• 4 years ago

So ~35 times overhead seems like an OK outcome...

This what development has become!

mysterydip3• 4 years ago

Agreed, that doesn't seem too bad for the RAM they gave the system. Wonder how stable that number is when things are running? My assumption is it should be about the same since electron is running the emulation program, regardless of what the OS does.

codedokode• 4 years ago

This is not a correct measurement. You should also account for memory used by shareable data like binary and libraries, and memory swapped out.

On Linux, one can add PSS to get more or less accurate number.

snickerer• 4 years ago

From the technology point of view running-real-software-as-JS-in-your-browser is always impressive and entertaining to watch. Cheers to the developers for such fun projects!

When we talk about efficiency of (other) electron apps made for productive use… the web page says this project does run Doom (cool) at a resolution of 640x480. So electron cripples my 2022 machine down to something like a 100 Mhz Pentium. That is totally fine for a funny tech demo, but I hate the need to use such programs for my daily work.

But, sorry, Pentium, I must take that crippling stuff back. I had chat apps in 1998 that had much higher responsiveness and faster start-up time than the electron chat apps I need to use for work today.

You, dear reader, may have already guessed my point here. Today software development is done often with many layers of bloat and glue, just to save some developer time and necessary developer expertise in the short term. The price we pay for this is a tremendous waste of resources.

iasay• 4 years ago

I can see the mountains of coal being used to power electron apps in my head…

jeffhuys• 4 years ago

just to save some developer time

That's actually the #1 reason to use any of these bloated development environments. And it's also the reason why it's so popular. But I agree, here we are, getting angry at bitcoin because it uses so much energy, but if I would need to guess, could it be that Discord and Slack _alone_ use more energy world-wide than the entire bitcoin network? Those are on 100% of the time on most PCs.

AndrewThrowaway4• 4 years ago

Exactly this.

I have a brand new laptop and I could swear I had much more responsiveness in any other chat app 15 years ago than I have now in MS Teams.

Everything is delayed and "not immediate" while 15 years ago it was in Skype!

How much power is being wasted, CO2 generated globally because of this?

zitterbewegung2• 4 years ago

Bitcoin / Ethereum will peak any device perform if the calculation such as an ASIC, CPU or GPU which is 200 watts or more. I don’t think that Discord or Slack aren’t even peaking CPUs or GPUs while they are running and also they don’t run 24 hours a day.

EGreg2• 4 years ago

The difference is that they handle 10,000,000 more transactions per second than Bitcoin. People are able to talk, have multi person voice and video conversations, even entire communities. On blockchains, no matter how many nodes join, it’s the same capacity. In fact it’s the only tech in history that promises to become slower and more expensive with time.

phaedrus• 4 years ago

And is the juice even worth the squeeze? We're using astronomically more computing power to enable developer conveniences that are (however you define or measure it) not astronomical improvements.

I've heard the developer time argument since I started coding in the 90s and have been skeptical of it just as long. I think it's a post hoc justification for practices we already do.

Software development is partly fad and fashion driven, is passed on by imitation, and code is often easier to write than to read. Almost all of the effort has gone towards expanding the numerator in that write/read ratio, and there's neither sufficient incentive to making tools to cut out layers nor widely accepted practices for how that works comparable to those we have for adding layers.

All this adds up to a strong entropic gradient toward software inefficiency, independent of whether or not it actually makes developers more efficient, but leading to a worse experience for users either way. Bucking the trend to make software more efficient can also improve developer time, as Linus Torvalds' argument why it was worthwhile to make git fast. I contend the justification that producing bloated software saves developer time is only true when selectively applied.

My axe to grind here is I question whether we wouldn't have similar improvements if we'd put the similar effort into making better tooling, education, and API design for native (and/or) compiled software ecosystems that we do towards things-that-we-use-because-they-are-there (whether or not they're the best tool for the job in a broader sense).

enlyth• 4 years ago

On Discord or Slack I can copy a screenshot and send it to loads of people with simply Ctrl-V, I don't have to manually upload to some random image host website and copy and paste links which usually link to some page with a thousand ads.

I can join a voice channel seamlessly, talk to my friends, listen to music together, stream my screen, watch others streaming their screen, build custom interactive bots that manage rich media, send messages from my apps to a channel with webhooks which I can create in seconds, see what other people are playing or listening to, reply with custom emotes, create threads, add syntax highlighted code blocks, etc. I could go on for an hour.

None of the old school 1998 irc channels had these capabilities and I'm sick of everyone on HN pretending like it's the same thing. If it was, people would use it.

horsawlarway2• 4 years ago

But I agree, here we are, getting angry at bitcoin because it uses so much energy, but if I would need to guess, could it be that Discord and Slack _alone_ use more energy world-wide than the entire bitcoin network? Those are on 100% of the time on most PCs.

No. The answer is clearly no.

Lets do some quick back of the napkin math to see why...

Discord reports ~150 million monthly active users. Lets assume they're all on all the time.

Lets assume most of these users are hardware that's running in the 50watt range (very high for mobile, high for a laptop, lowish for desktop) - Further lets assume that discord uses ALL of it (and we know this is false - it's likely under 5%).

So we have 150 million machines, using 50 watts. This is ~7500 megawatts of power for discord.

Now we run the same numbers for Slack - we'll keep the hardware estimates the same, but use the latest slack numbers of ~12 million active users.

So we have 12 million machines, using 50 watts. This is ~600 megawatts of power for slack.

So combined, for discord and slack, assuming they use the ENTIRE power budget of the machine they run on, they represent about 8100 Megawatts of power usage.

The best number I can find for bitcoin puts the usage at about 150 terawatt hours a year.

If we take our 8100 megawatts and run it for a year - we get... drumroll: 70.956 terawatt hours of annual consumption.

Or roughly half the power consumption of bitcoin, even when we assume discord and slack are literally consuming the ENTIRE power budget of the machines they're running on, and that they're running literally all the time.

A more realistic guess might be that slack and discord use roughly 1% of the electricity that bitcoin uses. And personally - I think they're providing a boat-load more value for the watts.

Fair caution - All my numbers are back of the envelope, and I did the math quickly and without paper. Feel free to point out if I missed something or dropped a step in a calculation.

scotty795• 4 years ago

It's all super fuzzy. Let's say I want to build native app instead. I start Visual Studio, which doesn't feel faster than Electron, then I start new C# project which doesn't feel faster than Electron. But wait... C# is also not native code, it runs on some sort of VM so I should switch to C++ but it supposedly isn't much faster andbit uses same gui controls and libraries that C# does and it also doesn't feel any faster.

How to be so much better than Electron that it matters?

jdthedisciple2• 4 years ago

C# can be easily compiled to native code. The JIT Compilation is just a convenience that ultimately helps with development. You don't have to use it in production.

2143• 4 years ago

Can experts weigh on the feasibility of Vala/Lua?

vinyl72• 4 years ago

I start Visual Studio, which doesn't feel faster than Electron

Well...Visual Studio is a part of the horribly written software collection.

Here's an example of actually good software: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r9eQth4Q5jg&t=2s

orphea• 4 years ago

C# is also not native code, it runs on some sort of VM

This is not true. .NET code is JIT-compiled into native code.

Aldipower• 4 years ago

You are citing incorrectly. The webpages says that: "I can recommend that you switch to a resolution of 640x480 @ 256 colors before starting DOS games - just like in the good ol' days."

Maybe I am nitpicking, but it also runs doom with 1024x786 or higher. He just recommend it for the "good old days".

aasasd• 4 years ago

electron cripples my 2022 machine down to something like a 100 Mhz Pentium

Yes, every Electron app you use runs X86 emulation inside. Very observant of you to notice this dirty secret.

Katharsas• 4 years ago

I think you might be misunderstanding what this post is about.

That version of Doom is not running on Electron directly. It is running on v86, which is a x86 WASM emulator, so essentially the entire graphics stack of the game and the entire OS its running in is emulated.

The resulting performance characteristics have absolutely nothing to do with a normal Electron app.

When we talk about efficiency of (other) electron apps made for productive use

Other electron apps for productive use is what the post is specifically NOT about. I find it higly irritating, when comments like yours are used to inject the never-ending and frankly tiring Electron-performance discussion into anything Electron related, drowning out discussion that would actually relevant and on topic.

isoprophlex• 4 years ago

You can also run windows95 in Electron, in a virtual X server, in a JavaScript VNC client, in a Kubernetes workspace.

It's turtles all the way down

jdthedisciple2• 4 years ago

Does it run Age of Empires I?

AndrianV• 4 years ago

Hello, so occasionally you might get this white screen that prevents you from being able to stop, restart, or reset. I'm shocked that no one else running Windows 95 noticed this problem.

merricksb• 4 years ago

First seen here as a Show HN in 2018:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17827797

davibu• 4 years ago

I had the opportunity to do some modest contributions to the underlying project (v86). I wanted to implement the full SIMD instruction sets, but it was almost impossible due to the current limitations of javascript.

The only way to do it properly would have been to wait for the support of SIMD instructions in webassembly. I had a chat with the main contributor Fabian, he had plans to port v86 in webassembly. I wonder if he ever succeed.

So this not a complete emulation as far I know, there is room for improvements.

thedougd• 4 years ago

In the mid-2000s I used Lotus Sametime at work. We could send text, emoji, pictures, and more. It had a plugin system that would extend the client side to do things like automatically look up issue numbers found in the chat and expand them into hyperlinks with full descriptions.

It was cross platform with a native UI thanks to Eclipse RCP, Java, and SWT. We moaned at the time that it sucked up 200 megabytes of memory and had a long startup time.

I use Microsoft Teams daily and sometimes chuckle that in some areas we seem to only reinvent the wheel with dubious outcomes.

racl101• 4 years ago

Wanna get this just for minesweeper.

smm11• 4 years ago

The NeXT OS is all but running on your iPhone now. Sort of a reverse resource waste.

divbzero• 4 years ago

I’m installing this just to play Minesweeper.

daveslash• 4 years ago

I'm holing out for Electron Windows 3.1 so I can bust out Chip's Challenge and Ski Free.

Windows 95 in Electron

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