Mounting tar archives as a filesystem in WebAssembly
Summary
The article describes mounting tar archives directly as a filesystem in WebAssembly using Emscripten's WORKERFS, avoiding extraction by leveraging a JSON index of file offsets. It covers generating the index with tar-vfs-index, streaming decompression for gzipped tarballs, and mounting the indexed blob in the VFS, enabling zero-copy reads from a tar-like blob. The approach is demonstrated with WebR and includes options to embed metadata inside the tarball for a self-contained deployment.