A developer shares their vision for UVM, a minimalistic custom virtual machine designed to be a sandboxed, cross-platform software distribution system. The goal is to combine the convenience of package managers like apt/brew with mobile-style capability-based sandboxing and true cross-platform portability. UVM uses a simple instruction set targeting x86-64, arm64, and RISC-V, exposes only low-level APIs (no FFI), and packages programs as single self-contained files. The author compares UVM to existing solutions (Docker, AppImage, Flatpak, JVM, Wasm, browsers) and explains why none fully solve the combination of portability, sandboxing, and ease of use. A working prototype exists with sound, graphics, and networking APIs, and Doom has been compiled to run on it via a Clang backend. Next steps include switching to a register-based interpreter, implementing a JIT compiler, and designing the permission model. The post solicits community feedback and contributors.
