Tokamak VS threads

https://github.com/TokamakUI/Tokamak

I’m also working (slowly) on native Flutter channels:

https://github.com/PADL/FlutterSwift

But this is really targeted at embedded use cases.

There is Tokamak but I don't know how usable it is just yet.

TokamakUI runs via SwiftUI on WASM for web. Apple just hired the creator of the framework.

You can even make web apps by creating web components in swift with Tokamak.

I am playing around with Tokamak just for a bit of fun and learning, and it's been pretty solid so far! Though I want to branch out and play with some dynamic data from a random API, instead of just using mocked/pre-populated data.

There is SwiftWasm that compiles swift into WebAssembly so you can run it in the browser, but swift can't directly manipulate the DOM so you'd still need JavaScript or something like TokamakUI so you can design the front-end portion of your app.

Similarly for threads: https://github.com/webassembly/threads

Specifically I submitted this to draw attention to the latest comment in the thread: https://github.com/WebAssembly/threads/issues/177

It's a good deep dive into how a small, but well-intentioned, browser choice nearly a decade ago led to poor outcomes for the WebAssembly ecosystem.

The answer is: it's complicated. Which is most of the time the answer in the WASI world.

For this case it's complicated because some runtime supports https://github.com/WebAssembly/threads which mostly contains things like the spec for atomic but not the actual "threads" specs and then some runtimes (i.e wasmtime) also supports https://github.com/WebAssembly/wasi-threads which is one version of the threads. But a new proposal came into play https://github.com/abrown/thread-spawn so ... it's complicated.

There’s a proposal for threads

WebAssembly is having/going to have threads

https://github.com/WebAssembly/threads

It's disappointing to see the WebAssembly/threads proposal is still only in proposal state, despite existing since 2018. It being just a proposal stops languages like golang from actually implementing support for it, despite Chrome supporting it since v70.

Ah, I should have clarified that I mean the assembly instructions for atomics, rather than the JavaScript API. I.e. the opcodes listed here: https://github.com/WebAssembly/threads/blob/master/proposals...

Another point to add here is that the current wasm specification does not support threads although there is a proposal to add one. So I imagine that till the wasm specification includes it, we will continue to have only single threaded canisters.