WASM-ImageMagick VS wapm-cli

Credit: Go check it out the GitHub project page thanks to Nick Maliwacki's (KnicKnic)

Image Conversion via WASM-ImageMagick

I've gone with ImageMagick ported to WebAssembly to do basically the exact same things as with FFMpeg, but with a tiny bit less locking up. In the future I would like to get these things running in multithreaded Web Workers as well as have the ability to easily configure transcode settings to whatever is desired instead of the defaults as it is now.

When it comes to audio/video the trusted tool that is often used on the desktop is FFmpeg and this too has been ported to run in the browser, although if you want multithreading you will need to make sure you have special CORS headers enabled to gain access to the SharedArrayBuffer. For images on desktop there is the popular ImageMagick which indeed also has been ported.

ImageMagick is the go to for these kinda things and apparently there is a WASM version: https://github.com/KnicKnic/WASM-ImageMagick

To actually compile this we can use a tool called WABT (WebAssembly Binary Toolkit). It's basically a mess that requires CMake and I couldn't get it to run on WSL and I wasn't going to install MinGW. Instead there's a nice tool called WAPM from Wasmer which works like npm for webassembly packages and since it's been compiled down to webassembly we can run it in any environment. In fact we don't even need to add configuration so long as wapm is installed. We can run wax wat2wasm -- wat/mat.wat -o wasm/mat.wasm. wax is like npx for npm. If you're wondering the command we give wax is defined by the wasmer/wabt package: https://wapm.io/wasmer/wabt. Also for some reason you can't prefix local paths with ./ so wax wat2wasm -- ./wat/mat.wat doesn't work which tool me a while to figure out. Anyway this provides a nice simple compile environment if you want to work on raw WAT files.

That's the main reason we should start using WebAssembly for distributing and using packages.

Shamless plug: Wasmer [1] and WAPM [2] could help a lot on this quest!

[1]: https://wasmer.io/

[2]: https://wapm.io/

There's WAPM

If it's buildable for the WebAssembly WASI target, consider also distributing it through WAPM.

I don't know if many people have heard of it, but there's actually a WebAssembly Package Manager. It's similar to crates.io, except you upload WebAssembly binaries written in any language instead of Rust source code!

You can see this paying off with wapm, which lets you download applications that would have normally required compilation for your environment and run them anywhere with a supported runtime, which is imo pretty neat.

One step closer to the day when I can put actix-web creations up on WAPM so "Just type wax my-cool-thing to try it out" can be one of the distribution options.

I've added limited support to run wapm.io directly from the Terminal. Examples of commands that work well are wapm cowsay {Text} and wapm uuid.