Wanix — Wasm-Native Unix Sandboxing for the Web

Wanix is a browser-native framework for running real Wasm and x86 programs, entirely sandboxed, with no server. Its one-line pitch: "Run and interact with real Wasm and x86 programs entirely sandboxed in the browser. No server. Inspired by Plan 9." You drop a <script type="module"> tag pointing at the jsDelivr CDN (wanix@0.4.0-rc2) into any page and compose a Unix environment from a handful of custom HTML elements.

The system is built from a small set of web components. <wanix-task> runs an executable in a namespace (with built-in JS and Wasm drivers); <wanix-term> attaches an xterm.js terminal to a task or VM; <wanix-vm> boots a headless Linux VM powered by v86; <wanix-namespace> creates an explicit namespace container; and <wanix-bind> is the bind-mount primitive — it can fetch or inline a file (type="file"), unpack a .tar/.tgz archive into a directory tree and layer multiple archives into a recursive union (type="archive"), or import a remote namespace over 9P via WebSocket or an embedded iframe (type="import"). The extended component, <wanix-workbench>, embeds a full VS Code workbench backed by the namespace as editor, file explorer, or app shell.

The conceptual core is Plan 9 transplanted to the web: per-process namespaces and everything-is-a-file. Namespaces can be in-memory (#ramfs), backed by browser persistent storage (#web/opfs), or a VM's exported guest filesystem (#vm/1/guest via export="ttyS0"). Give a namespace an id and allow-origins and another page can import it with a bind — namespaces compose across origins the way Plan 9's 9P protocol let processes share file trees. The site's closing thesis, in its own words: "a research OS from the 90s turns out to be the right model for the local-first web."