Data Structures and Algorithms

Beyond WebAssembly: Rethinking the Web Browser with Post-JavaScript, VM-Free Page Execution

Authors: Brent Hartshorn

The web’s active-content model rests on JavaScript and, beneath it, on WebAssembly — a stack virtual machine that, in current browsers, must cross a JavaScript boundary for every access to the document. We report a web browser built from the ground up on the minipy/ShivyCX substrate, in which a page’s active content is either Python, executed by an embedded interpreter against a live document, or native machine code compiled ahead of time from an rpython script and invoked through ctypes—with no virtual machine, no JavaScript wrapper layer,and no third-party browser engine. Concretely: script type="python" runs against a shared document/console/window; script type="rpython" is compiled (py2c → gcc -O2) to a cached per-page shared object callable by ctypes, while the same source still runs on stock CPython; a canvas is drawn by a JIT-compiled native fragment shader with time and pointer uniforms at one native call per frame; and JavaScript runs by translation onto the same interpreter and document, not a second VM. Nothing from Blink, WebKit, Gecko, Servo, orNetSurf is used; pages render through a small software widget layer into a Wayland frame buffer. We position the result as a systems alternative to Redox OS (which ports NetSurf or Servo) and ChromeOS (which is Chrome/V8/Blink), and as a descendant of TempleOS’s ground-up philosophy— arguing that each of these optimizes within the JavaScript/engine boundary, whereas co-designing the page-execution model lets us move it.

Comments: 8 Pages.

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Submission history

[v1] 2026-07-08 11:50:28

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