spec VS go

Compare spec vs go and see what are their differences.

spec

WebAssembly specification, reference interpreter, and test suite. (by WebAssembly)
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spec go
12 2,070
3,061 119,564
0.8% 1.2%
8.3 10.0
6 days ago 5 days ago
WebAssembly Go
GNU General Public License v3.0 or later BSD 3-clause "New" or "Revised" License
The number of mentions indicates the total number of mentions that we've tracked plus the number of user suggested alternatives.
Stars - the number of stars that a project has on GitHub. Growth - month over month growth in stars.
Activity is a relative number indicating how actively a project is being developed. Recent commits have higher weight than older ones.
For example, an activity of 9.0 indicates that a project is amongst the top 10% of the most actively developed projects that we are tracking.

spec

Posts with mentions or reviews of spec. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2024-02-18.
  • WASM Instructions
    13 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 18 Feb 2024
    You can parse many things from this file, what are you trying to extract?

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

  • The fastest word counter in JavaScript
    2 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 22 Apr 2023
    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.

  • Is Blazor server and Blazor Webassembly going to be a big market? I am trying to figure out a niche to go with and I have some asp.net core mvc experience but I am working on a e-commerce .net6 Blazor Webassembly app.
    2 projects | /r/csharp | 19 Dec 2022
    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.
  • Smolnes: A NES Emulator In
    7 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 28 Oct 2022
    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

  • Exploring WebAssembly, The Underlying Technology Behind Blazor WASM.
    1 project | dev.to | 16 Jul 2022
    [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).
  • Show HN: We are trying to (finally) get tail-calls into the WebAssembly standard
    11 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 12 Jul 2022
    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

  • WebAssembly 2.0 Working Draft
    21 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 19 Apr 2022
  • A challenger to the throne of vector graphics. SVG is dead, long live TinyVG
    7 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 20 Dec 2021
  • Microsoft joins Bytecode Alliance to advance WebAssembly – aka the thing that lets you run compiled C/C++/Rust code in browsers
    12 projects | /r/programming | 28 Apr 2021
    The WASM paper discusses that in the final section: https://github.com/WebAssembly/spec/blob/master/papers/pldi2017.pdf
  • Is there a small, well-specified language with lots of example programs?
    2 projects | /r/ProgrammingLanguages | 4 Jan 2021
    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.

go

Posts with mentions or reviews of go. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2024-04-28.
  • AWS Serverless Diversity: Multi-Language Strategies for Optimal Solutions
    4 projects | dev.to | 28 Apr 2024
    Now, I’m not going to use C++ again; I left that chapter years ago, and it’s not going to happen. C++ isn’t memory safe and easy to use and would require extended time for developers to adapt. Rust is the new kid on the block, but I’ve heard mixed opinions about its developer experience, and there aren’t many libraries around it yet. LLRD is too new for my taste, but **Go** caught my attention.
  • How to use Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) for Go applications
    3 projects | dev.to | 28 Apr 2024
    Generative AI development has been democratised, thanks to powerful Machine Learning models (specifically Large Language Models such as Claude, Meta's LLama 2, etc.) being exposed by managed platforms/services as API calls. This frees developers from the infrastructure concerns and lets them focus on the core business problems. This also means that developers are free to use the programming language best suited for their solution. Python has typically been the go-to language when it comes to AI/ML solutions, but there is more flexibility in this area. In this post you will see how to leverage the Go programming language to use Vector Databases and techniques such as Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) with langchaingo. If you are a Go developer who wants to how to build learn generative AI applications, you are in the right place!
  • From Homemade HTTP Router to New ServeMux
    4 projects | dev.to | 26 Apr 2024
    net/http: add methods and path variables to ServeMux patterns Discussion about ServeMux enhancements
  • Building a Playful File Locker with GoFr
    4 projects | dev.to | 19 Apr 2024
    Make sure you have Go installed https://go.dev/.
  • Fastest way to get IPv4 address from string
    1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 14 Apr 2024
  • We now have crypto/rand back ends that ~never fail
    1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 14 Apr 2024
  • Why Go is great choice for Software engineering.
    2 projects | dev.to | 7 Apr 2024
    The Go Programming Language
  • OpenBSD 7.5 Released
    5 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 5 Apr 2024
    When Go first shipped, it was already well-documented that the only stable ABI on some platforms was via dynamic libraries (such as libc) provided by said platforms. Go knowingly and deliberately ignored this on the assumption that they can get away with it. And then this happened:

    https://github.com/golang/go/issues/16606

    If that's not "getting burned", I don't know what is. "Trying to provide a nice feature" is an excuse, and it can be argued that it is a valid one, but nevertheless they knew that they were using an unstable ABI that could be pulled out from under them at any moment, and decided that it's worth the risk. I don't see what that has to do with "not being as broadly compatible as they had hoped", since it was all known well in advance.

  • Go's Error Handling Is Perfect
    2 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 5 Apr 2024
    Sadly, I think that is indeed radically different from Go’s design. Go lacks anything like sum types, and proposals to add them to the language have revealed deep issues that have stalled any development. See https://github.com/golang/go/issues/57644
  • Golang: out-of-box backpressure handling with gRPC, proven by a Grafana dashboard
    4 projects | dev.to | 3 Apr 2024
    I've been writing a lot about Go and gRPC lately:

What are some alternatives?

When comparing spec and go you can also consider the following projects:

uwm-masters-thesis - My thesis for my Master's in Computer Science degree from the University of Wisconsin - Milwaukee.

v - Simple, fast, safe, compiled language for developing maintainable software. Compiles itself in <1s with zero library dependencies. Supports automatic C => V translation. https://vlang.io

Oberon - Oberon parser, code model & browser, compiler and IDE with debugger

TinyGo - Go compiler for small places. Microcontrollers, WebAssembly (WASM/WASI), and command-line tools. Based on LLVM.

meetings - WebAssembly meetings (VC or in-person), agendas, and notes

zig - General-purpose programming language and toolchain for maintaining robust, optimal, and reusable software.

component-model - Repository for design and specification of the Component Model

Nim - Nim is a statically typed compiled systems programming language. It combines successful concepts from mature languages like Python, Ada and Modula. Its design focuses on efficiency, expressiveness, and elegance (in that order of priority).

proposals - Tracking WebAssembly proposals

Angular - Deliver web apps with confidence 🚀

wit-bindgen - A language binding generator for WebAssembly interface types

golang-developer-roadmap - Roadmap to becoming a Go developer in 2020