Download Latest Version
wanix_0.3-preview_darwin_amd64.zip (29.0 MB)
Get an email when there's a new version of WANIX
| Name | Modified | Size | Downloads / Week |
|---|---|---|---|
| Parent folder | |||
| wanix_0.3-preview_linux_arm64.zip | 2025-04-25 | 18.6 MB | |
| wanix_0.3-preview_linux_amd64.zip | 2025-04-25 | 19.2 MB | |
| wanix_0.3-preview_darwin_arm64.zip | 2025-04-25 | 27.5 MB | |
| wanix_0.3-preview_darwin_amd64.zip | 2025-04-25 | 29.0 MB | |
| README.md | 2025-04-25 | 4.0 kB | |
| v0.3-preview source code.tar.gz | 2025-04-25 | 204.5 kB | |
| v0.3-preview source code.zip | 2025-04-25 | 265.0 kB | |
| Totals: 7 Items | 94.7 MB | 3 | |
The Spirit of Plan 9 in Wasm
- 📺 Demo Video: Shows all the below and more, plus background
- ✨ Interactive Demo: Live deployment of default Wanix environment in the browser
This is a preview release for v0.3 which is a major rewrite and redesign inspired by Plan 9. This release is incompatible with v0.2 and many of its features are not yet available on this new platform. Instead, this release focuses on these new features as a foundation for the future:
- Plan 9 inspired design
- With the original intention to allow exploring Plan 9 ideas on modern platforms, we've ended up with a radically simple architecture around per-process namespaces composed of file service capabilities using similar design patterns to those found in Plan 9.
- Single executable toolchain
- The
wanixexecutable includes everything needed to produce Wanix environments. - Filesystem is the only API
- The Wanix microkernel is now simply a VFS module with several built-in file services exposed via a standard filesystem API. This ends up making the module itself a file service.
- Built-in Linux shell
- Using the built-in file service primitives, Wanix can bootstrap a Linux-compatible shell based on Busybox. It comes with several helper commands for working with built-in file services.
- Tasks and namespaces
- The Wanix unit of compute is a task, which is equivalent and compatible with POSIX processes but allows for different execution strategies. Each task has its own "namespace," which is the customizable filesystem exposed to the task.
- Core file services
- Wanix includes two singleton file services: one to manage tasks (similar to procfs), and one to manage "capabilities" which are user allocated file services. Built-in capabilities include: tarfs, tmpfs, and loopback.
- Web module
- With future non-browser deployments in mind, all web related file services are packaged in a web module, which is also built-in but not considered core. This module includes these work-in-progress file services:
- opfs: For working with the OPFS browser storage API
- dom: For inspecting and manipulating the DOM
- worker: For managing web workers
- pickerfs: Capability wrapping the
window.showDirectoryPicker()method (not available yet in Safari and Firefox) - ws: Capability for working with WebSocket connections
- sw: For configuring the service worker, which is used by the system now to cache all resources needed to run Wanix allowing offline usage, as well as exposing virtual URLs to the root namespace.
- Filesystem toolkit for Go
- The Wanix VFS and file services are built around a general purpose Go package for building and working with filesystems based on the
io/fspackage and API of the standard library. This package can be used entirely independent of Wanix for building FUSE filesystems and network file servers (9P, etc).
Be sure to watch the demo video linked above for background and example usage. We're working on documenting the roadmap to v0.3 in this milestone. Special thanks to @taramk and @jpf!
Full Changelog: https://github.com/tractordev/wanix/commits/v0.3-preview