How is this running the vm/container? Cloud or something like container2wasm?

Kinda cool I’m on my phone, on an alpine terminal, and genuinely need to ask if it’s running in the browser.

iOS Safari stuck in a redirect loop (loading... indicator reaches 90% then hard refresh, repeat till error message)

cool, would love to see it!

yeah, it just means everything runs on your machine. there are services like E2B, sprites.dev and others that give you sandboxes in the cloud. shuru runs VMs locally using Apple's Virtualization.framework, so nothing leaves your Mac.

Seems it only support macOS so for practical purpouses it's local-only.

Unfortunately yes. It's just another stupid marketing buzzword these days.

It's a good article and seems to mirror my experience doing partial-AI software development. If you are not saving your context for decision making and your conclusions in software architecture (as made between developers and AI) you are losing very valuable context information on software design. Although I'm not sure the article ties closely to the topic of micro VMs.

apple container is more of a docker-style workflow, OCI images, registries, etc. shuru is just micro VMs with checkpointing, much simpler scope.

Lima can do a lot of what shuru does if you set it up for it. the difference is mostly in defaults and how much you have to configure upfront. with shuru you get ephemeral VMs, no networking, and a clean rootfs on every run without touching a config file. shuru run and you're in. Checkpoints and branching are built into the CLI rather than being an experimental feature you have to figure out. Lima is a much bigger and more mature project though. Shuru is something I am building partly to learn and partly because I wanted something with saner defaults for this specific use case.

lume is a much more full featured VM manager, macOS and Linux VMs, API server, prebuilt images, python SDK etc. shuru is intentionally minimal.

AFAIK that's not possible at the moment. Apple limits the full GPU acceleration for macOS guests.

haven't thought about multi-agent communication yet. each sandbox is fully isolated which is the point. checkpoints help a bit here though, you can branch multiple agents from the same checkpoint so they all start from the same state.

Same, I really want to use sprites (for me and my whole team) but every time I try to set up, I run into weird issues. Last time I got in some state where trying to launch Claude froze the whole VM every time.

We built SlicerVM for this in 2022, but not just for sandboxing. It's for servers + API launched VMs (i.e. what we now like to call a 'sandbox'). Feel free to take a look, a lot of our early users are saying things like this.

glad you liked it! I am currently exploring options for Linux support. will share an update soon.

containers work fine for a lot of this. shuru is just what felt more natural to me. less config overhead and i wanted to learn by building it.

Wow I never knew this existed. Thanks for pointing this out!

thanks! let me know how it goes

Not true, OrbStack uses Virtualization.framework: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36189550

OrbStack is great but it is solving a different problem. it's a full Docker Desktop replacement. shuru is just a thin layer over Virtualization.framework for spinning up throwaway sandboxes.

OrbStack has some invasive elements inside it trying to provide filesystem integration, and the filesystem they use is not POSIX compliant and causes breakage with some build systems and other software.