Doppio

Doppio: Breaking the Browser Language Barrier (PLDI 2014, to appear)
John Vilk and Emery D. Berger

Web browsers have become a de facto universal operating system, and JavaScript its instruction set. Unfortunately, running other languages in the browser is not generally possible. Translation to JavaScript is not enough because browsers are a hostile environment for other languages. Previous approaches are either non-portable or require extensive modifications for programs to work in a browser.

Doppio is a JavaScript-based runtime system that makes it possible to run unaltered applications written in general- purpose languages directly inside the browser. Doppio provides a wide range of runtime services, including a file system that enables local and external (cloud-based) storage, an unmanaged heap, sockets, blocking I/O, and multiple threads. We demonstrate Doppio's usefulness with two case studies: we extend Emscripten with Doppio, letting it run an unmodified C++ application in the browser with full functionality, and present DoppioJVM, an interpreter that runs unmodified JVM programs directly in the browser.

Source Code and Demo

The latest version of Doppio is available for download at GitHub: https://github.com/int3/doppio.
A fully-functional demo of DoppioJVM is at doppiojvm.org.

 
John Vilk   Emery Berger