specification VS spec

TinyVG follows the similar goals: an alternative to SVG with a specification which trades off features for simplicity. https://tinyvg.tech/

I wholehearedly agree with your point on information blackholes but I think the reason some people hate SVG is that they've had had to advanced things with or had to work with the spec and implement something around it. I haven't done so myself but I can tell pain when I read it.

Here is a mostly compatible alternative: https://tinyvg.tech/

I created a library to parse TinyVG files

After taking an interest in TinyVG I got to wondering if there is a similar idea just applied to conforming SVG files. Basically a format that includes nothing but basic paths, colors, gradients and a few shapes to make the implementation relatively easy to create.

If so, can you please make an issue in the specification repo: https://github.com/TinyVG/specification/

You can parse many things from this file, what are you trying to extract?

https://github.com/WebAssembly/spec/blob/main/document/core/...

Still strikes me as super sad JS never got SIMD support. It seemed like there were some strong candidate specs. On Node there are some add-on npm libraries that implement.

My understanding was the main protest was that we would get wasm & some certain implementers said they wanted to focus their energy on wasm.

That was well over half a decade ago & wasm is still in incredible infancy, with basically only statically linked capabilities in the spec.

Wasm SIMD proposal itself only merged into wasm in November 2021. https://github.com/WebAssembly/spec/pull/1391

It seems really unfortunate to have decided to keep JS the slow inferior language.

Blazor and WASM itself (outside of dotnet) are relatively new tools and they already show impressive results. They will keep getting better with every release. E.g. this proposal https://github.com/WebAssembly/spec/blob/main/proposals/simd/SIMD.md which should bring WASM closer to "near native speed". Blazor already started working on it true.

Big fan of this author's work.

They have a Gameboy emulator written in C, which can be compiled to WASM and run in the browser.

https://github.com/binji/binjgb

I learned a lot from the code.

Also I love this project with a bunch of demos in hand-written WebAssembly Text (WAT) format, which is like low-level Lisp that works only with raw memory, numbers, and minimal syntax.

https://github.com/binji/raw-wasm

Then I discovered the same author is quite active in the WebAssembly ecosystem, including specs and tooling. Fascinating stuff!

https://github.com/WebAssembly/spec

https://github.com/WebAssembly/wabt

[The WebAssembly specification (https://webassembly.github.io/spec/) maintains that the standards apply to more than just the browser host, but also to any other compliant host runtime (what the specification refers to as an embedder).

Heya,

(1) Thank you for implementing this in JSC!! I hope they take it, it makes it into Safari, and the tail-call proposal advances.

(2) I don't think you are exactly right about the call stack being observable via thrown exceptions. There's no formal spec for the v3 exceptions proposal yet, but in the documents and tests, there's nothing that would change in WebAssembly core to make the call stack observable. It's true that the proposal amends the JS API (but only the JS API) to describe a traceStack=true option; from Wasm's perspective I understand that's just an ordinary exception that happens to include an externref value (just like any other value) to which Wasm itself attaches no special significance. The engine can attach a stack trace if it wants, but there's no requirement (here) about what that stack trace contains or whether some frames might have been optimized out.

(3) I think the real reason that a Wasm engine can't implicitly make tail calls proper is that the spec tests forbid it, basically because they didn't want the implementation base to split by having some engines perform an optimization that changes the space complexity of a program, which some programs would have started to depend on (the spec tests say: "Implementations are required to have every call consume some abstract resource towards exhausting some abstract finite limit, such that infinitely recursive test cases reliably trap in finite time. This is because otherwise applications could come to depend on it on those implementations and be incompatible with implementations that don't do it (or don't do it under the same circumstances.)" More discussion here: https://github.com/WebAssembly/spec/issues/150

The WASM paper discusses that in the final section: https://github.com/WebAssembly/spec/blob/master/papers/pldi2017.pdf

WebAssembly has a formal specification that includes both operational semantics and natural language-based descriptions of everything in the language. The official repository also has a lot of tests. Besides tests, you should be able to find lots of examples by searching.