A few years ago we realized that the web was heading towards a key inflection point. The advent of WebAssembly and new capabilities APIs made it seem possible to write a WebAssembly-based operating system powerful enough to run Node.js, entirely inside your browser. We envisioned a superior development environment that was faster, more secure and consistent than local environments, to enable seamless code collaboration without ever having to set up a local environment.

This sounded far-fetched. But if the web now runs full environments for graphic designers, video editors, and rich document editing, we wondered: is it finally possible for developers to use the web to build the web?

Source: Introducing WebContainers: Run Node.js natively in your browser

I can’t tell if this is a terrible idea or not, but at the very least it’s intriguing. It looks like it’s built on WebAssembly, so I’m curious how long it will take for a similar approach to exist for Ruby, Python, etc.