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A comment on Show HN: Smol machines – subsecond coldstart, portable virtual machines. Parent comment

Re:Show HN: Smol machines – subsecond coldstart, portable vi... by binsquare on Friday April 17, 2026 @03:35PM (#47809716)
yeah, it's analogous to Electron.

Electron ships your web app bundled with a browser.

Smol machines ship your software packaged with a linux vm. No need for dependency management or compatibility issues because it is baked in.

I think this is how Codex or Claude Code should be shipped by default, to avoid any isolation issues tbh

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Show HN: Smol machines – subsecond coldstart, portable vi... by tkocmathla on Saturday April 18, 2026 @02:36AM (#47813647)
How "fat" are the packed machines? In other words, how much bloat is inevitable, or is that entirely controlled by the base image + the user's smolvm machine spec? How does smolvm's pack compare to something like dockerc [0] in terms of speed and size? Disclaimer: I just learned about dockerc!

I can't actually create and test a pack right now because of [1], but I love the idea of using this to distribute applications you might otherwise use a Docker image for.

[0] https://github.com/NilsIrl/dockerc

[1] https://github.com/smol-machines/smolvm/issues/159

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Show HN: Smol machines – subsecond coldstart, portable vi... by binsquare on Saturday April 18, 2026 @02:04PM (#47818043)
pretty light weight!

About the same size as the docker image to be honest. Join the discord and I'm happy to give you a white glove experience with onboarding :)

https://discord.gg/E5r8rEWY9J

[ Parent | on HN ]