Re: Help finding right place for my questions

By the way, on a somewhat unrelated side note, does anyone know why every
time I send an email to this mailing list, I get a reply email from a
company called "The Fork"? It seems that emails to this mailing list also
get sent as a support request to that company.

On Sun, Nov 10, 2019, 10:33 AM yun bao <[email protected]> wrote:

> I'm still in the initial information gathering phase of my thesis.  So I
> expect my thesis idea (which is admittedly rather vague at this point) to
> change a lot as I learn more about the domain.  However, as I'm applying to
> a graduate program outside of my home country, the application deadline is
> December 1st.  So, I don't have a lot of time to refine the idea.
>
> My original idea was to use as little JavaScript as possible.  At a bare
> minimum, I envision not needing to translate Python to JavaScript in some
> way, which is how most projects I've seen have managed to get Python
> running in a browser.  The long term goal is having a Python engine running
> in a web browser.  So, Python is actually executed as Python (or whatever
> Python is normally executed as under the hood), and not subjected to some
> convoluted process that turns it into JavaScript.
>
> I'm thinking the best Python implementation for use in a browser would be
> PyPy, since it uses JIT compilation.  I'm not sure that the whole of the
> Python standard library will ever be available for use in a browser,
> though.  I think, as a proof of concept, just getting a Python engine
> running in a browser, even if only a small subset of the standard library
> is available, and playing nice with a rendering/layout engine, would be a
> kind of success.
>
> The PyPy folks are currently working on sandboxing PyPy (
> https://pypy.readthedocs.io/en/latest/sandbox.html).  It seems like there
> might be a few research opportunities just in the security related aspects
> of running Python in a browser.
>
> Thank you for your input, Boris.  If you, or anyone else, have any more
> information or advice to share, I'd love to hear it.
>
> Andrew
>
> On Sat, Nov 9, 2019 at 9:55 PM Boris Zbarsky <[email protected]> wrote:
>
>> On 11/9/19 4:16 PM, yun bao wrote:
>> > Right now I'm trying to better understand the general domain and
>> discover if any
>> > there are any well known problems related to making a Python web browser
>> > engine.
>>
>> Are you planning to do _just_ Python, or both Python and JavaScript?
>>
>> In the latter case, there is one well-known problem: preventing leaks
>> due to circular object graphs that span both the JS and Python heaps,
>> because the JS garbage collector does not know about the Python side and
>> vice versa.  This was a significant problem for PyXPCOM before we
>> removed it.
>>
>> In both cases, there is the issue that the core Python language is not
>> really what anyone thinks of as "using Python"; people tend to assume
>> that with the language comes the standard library.  And the Python
>> standard library doesn't really have concepts of sandboxing, origins,
>> etc, that the web browser environment relies on for safety.  This means
>> that exposing parts of the standard library without introducing security
>> holes might be complicated, depending on your threat model.
>>
>> There are also various practical issues in terms of the browser
>> internals assuming that objects have JS representations, parts of web
>> APIs actually being very JS-specific (typed arrays, Promises, etc), and
>> other JS dependencies, but the above are the two big conceptual problems
>> I know of that people haven't really found solutions for in the past.
>>
>> -Boris
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>