Omar Rizwan
.
@omar,
hah what if you could just go to localhost:4930 to see the state of the process with PID 4930 etc
![[tweet thread screenshot]
Unix processes should maybe all run 'Web servers' and you can send your browser to like 'http://Chromium.localhost' or 'http://clang.localhost' and see various live internal data structures and computations of that program
@dabeaz
·
Feb 27, 2021
Replying to @whitequark
…years ago when working on Swig, it had a small embedded web-server in it that let you browse all of the compiler internal data structures with a browser. Super useful.](https://social.omar.website/fileserver/01PG4R73NMJC888MJM2KBM4CFF/attachment/original/01GCAMXK94PNYF3CMGGXJSA11A.png)
Omar Rizwan
.
@omar,
Omar Rizwan
.
@omar,
it's sort of fun to think about the details of how this would work, would there be OS APIs to register variables or Web page handlers or whatever, would the OS be able to unsafely sample your program literally while it's executing like some profilers do
Omar Rizwan
.
@omar,
and yeah, it's a 'modernization' of the idea of procfs or 9p -- make the web browser instead of file manager the frontend since people may be more familiar with that & it can render graphics and widgets, bolt something like livelits/Yoshiki-JSON/tangibles on top to derive GUI from datatypes