adama-lang VS quickjs-emscripten

I'm just a tryhard. However, I've been coding since a child out of a weird love/obsession. Nothing super successful in the public space, but I retired at 40 to spend time building my cathedral: https://www.adama-platform.com/

my history: https://www.adama-platform.com/2024/01/28/euler.html

I'm in the camp of f = ui(state), and the reason for this is the extreme of streaming games where UI = frame buffer. I'm inventing my own framework for radically simplifying traditional Web apps via RxHTML which works great for crud apps. However, games requires more insight into state machines and what-not.

In terms of the logic, I wrote an entire platform to simplify multi-player board games which I'm evolving to tackle various businesses. https://www.adama-platform.com/

For context, I was not raised religious at all and kind of thought a bunch of it was hokum.

But then I did a heroic dose, and I went to the church of engineering where I saw the entire construction of the machines use from the transistor all the way up to the platform I'm building.

My faith is more a faith that humanity is worth it, and I've come to see "The Lord" as an appropriate metaphor for the collective conciseness of several billion people living their lives.

At core, I'm rejecting nihilism as a valid way to live, and I'm writing an essay to outline the way.

In this, I also reject cynicism, and this is because it offers nothing.

The way forward is to embrace the responsibility that comes with great knowledge and to build an organization that helps push technology forward. This is why my platform is open source ( https://www.adama-platform.com/ ), and I'm working very hard to get my handful of clients in a good place.

I'll take the bait and provide evidence on why you should write a programming language.

First, it's technically very difficult, but you will gain deeper insight into the art of the craft. So, if you are a TC chaser or career minded person, then spending half a year writing a language will help you master the coding aspect of the game. I've started many languages since I started college, and each one was instructional. (I'm now 40 and an early retiree)

Second, it's fun.

Third, it may turn into something new. If some people don't write a new programming language, then we are stuck with what we have. This advice basically admits that the status quo is good enough.

The authors saying that the language, as a project, is a lifetime appointment? Well, this reveals everything. I believe if you want to do a programming language, then you must be willing to invest at least a decade or two.

So, here, I am at forty preparing to launch a SaaS around a language that I designed ( http://www.adama-lang.org/ ). The kicker, I believe, is that a project like this requires wandering the desert alone for quite a while.

I'm preparing to launch, and I just started to load test my shiny new production cluster. Low and behold, it sucks. Fortunately, I have a tremendous number of dashboards and isolated it to how I'm interacting with RDS. I've got my work cut out for me which I'll write about.

However, I have a potentially interesting business precisely because I evolved a language which solved a niche use-case. The number of problems that I have had to solve up to this point is not for the faint of heart. Life and reality are harsh mistress.

So, maybe, yes, you can save yourself some heartache by not writing a language. Perhaps, a better way to think or phase this is "Writing a programming language is a lonely affair that will most likely end in tragedy after a long death march".

I want to make games, but even some years ago I realized it was not a great path for a multitude of reason (many of which are in this article).

My path, and what I recommend, is do something hard and important which pays the bills at a premium. I did infrastructure work, and I was lucky to have a great decade long career allowing me to "retire early".

Now, I can work on a game at my pace building the tools that I see fit. I'm focused on board games because they have a timeless quality about them. I'm developing an entire SaaS platform and programming language to make the network goo beyond easy. http://www.adama-lang.org/

As I'm getting close to some kind of launch for the SaaS, my next thing is to build up my own web based IDE with a release-often ideology such that I can build a Roblox for online 2D board games. Honestly, I'm having a blast because I'm not suffering tools which are going to fade.

I like to call such a list a "wall of shame", and I have my own over here: http://jeffrey.io/wall-of-shame.html

What has helped me over the years is that I view tech as art, and so these projects are only market failures. Your growth as a technologist is manifest, and it's important to see side projects as a form of practice.

If you can move past the failure label and see everything as successful at something, then you feel a whole lot better. A discipline that I have had for decades now is to write a postmortem on why I believe a project is a failure because that crystalizes my learning.

My history helped me excel as a principal engineer which put me towards an early retirement where I can now focus on my ultimate side project: Adama ( http://www.adama-lang.org/ ) which I am turning into a new kind of PaaS thing.

Here is the crazy thing: I already know that I'm making several mistakes as I have no customers and no one asking me for anything. This is an exceptionally lonely way to start a project as the OP and others have noted, but I'm enjoying it well enough.

I'm working on http://www.adama-lang.org/ which started as a programming language for board games, and it is turning into a reactive privacy-focused data store for Jamstack.

I hope to launch in coming month an "Early Access" edition.

While I do intend to turn this into a business, I'm primarily focusing on small projects to amuse myself. I'm going to break every rule in the business with my LLC. The #1 company value is sleep.

I actually think this is onto something that I'm finding in a different way. Instead of a massive database, what if we had a key-value store mapping keys to tiny databases.

This is, to some degree, what I'm building over at http://www.adama-lang.org/ without a full SQL engine. Each document has tables, and the tables can be indexed. I have yet to find a usecase (in my domain) which requires joins. HOWEVER, I've had a ton of fun building it and I'm getting ready to start making games.

I do believe it would be amazing to have a key-logger service where a reducer like sqlite/adama could come into collapse the log into a single file.

The closest I see is from the Boki paper ( https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~zjia/boki-sosp21.pdf ) which was presented at SOSP21.

CRDT solve a part of your problem, and an important consideration is whether or not you want off-line editing. If you don't need off-line editing, then a WebSocket can do it.

I'm actually using my project to build a collaborative IDE (designer like Figma): http://www.adama-lang.org/

I'm going to be launching it as a SaaS soon so people can spin up a new back-end without managing an infrastructure.

Based on your comment below I think you figured out the difference - but if you're looking to execute JS, you can pick between ShadowRealm (where available, or using a polyfill) or my library quickjs-emscripten.

Pros of quickjs-emscripten over ShadowRealm:

- You can use quickjs today in any browser with WASM. ShadowRealm isn't available yet, and polyfills have had security issues in the past. See https://www.figma.com/blog/an-update-on-plugin-security/

- In ShadowRealm eval, untrusted code can consume arbitrary CPU cycles. With QuickJS, you can control the CPU time used during an `eval` using an [interrupt handler] that's called periodically during the eval.

- In ShadowRealm eval, untrusted code can allocate arbitrary amounts of memory. With QuickJS, you can control both the [stack size] and the [heap size] available inside the runtime.

- quickjs-emscripten can do interesting things with custom module loaders and facades that allow synchronous code inside the runtime to call async code on the host.

Pros of ShadowRealm over QuickJS:

- ShadowRealm will (presumably?) execute code using your native runtime, probably v8, JavaScriptCore, or SpiderMonkey. Quickjs is orders of magnitude slower than JIT'd javascript performance of v8 etc. It's also slower than v8/JSC's interpreters, although not by a huge amount. See [benchmarks] from 2019.

- You can easily call and pass values to ShadowRealm imported functions. Talking to quickjs-emscripten guest code requires a lot of fiddly and manual object building.

- Overall the quickjs(-emscripten) API is verbose, and requires manual memory management of references to values inside the quickjs runtime.

[interrupt handler]: https://github.com/justjake/quickjs-emscripten/blob/main/doc...

[stack size]: https://github.com/justjake/quickjs-emscripten/blob/main/doc...

[heap size]: https://github.com/justjake/quickjs-emscripten/blob/main/doc...

[benchmarks]: https://bellard.org/quickjs/bench.html

The thing I want to achieve with WebAssembly is still proving a lot harder than I had anticipated.

I want to be able to take strings of untrusted code provided by users and execute them in a safe sandbox.

I have all sorts of things I want this for - think custom templates for a web application, custom workflow automation scripts (Zapier-style), running transformations against JSON data.

When you're dealing with untrusted code you need a really robust sandbox. WebAssembly really should be that sandbox.

I'd like to support Python, JavaScript and maybe other languages too. I want to take a user-provided string of code in one of those languages and execute that in a sandbox with a strict limit on both memory usage and time taken (so I can't be crashed by a "while True" loop). If memory or time limit are exceeded, I want to get an exception which I can catch and return an error message to the user.

I've been exploring options for this for quite a while now. The furthest I've got was running Pyodide inside of Deno: https://til.simonwillison.net/deno/pyodide-sandbox

Surprisingly I've not found a good pattern for running a JavaScript interpreter in a WASM sandbox yet. https://github.com/justjake/quickjs-emscripten looks promising but I've not found the right recipe to call it from server-side Python or Deno yet.

Can Extism help with this? I'm confident I'm not the only person who's looking for a solution here!

"Safely execute untrusted Javascript in your Javascript, and execute synchronous code that uses async functions" quickjs-emscripten, NPM

This maybe, as a start?

https://github.com/justjake/quickjs-emscripten

QuickJS Running in WebAssembly\ (17 comments)

The library was inspired by Figma’s blog posts about their plug-in system: https://github.com/justjake/quickjs-emscripten#background

If you need to call into user-generated Javascript synchronously or have greater control over the sandbox environment, you can use WebAssembly to run a Javascript interpreter: https://github.com/justjake/quickjs-emscripten#quickjs-emscr...

QuickJS in WebAssembly is much slower than your browser's native Javascript runtime, but possibly faster than async calls using postMessage. As an added bonus, it can make async functions in the host appear to be synchronous inside the sandbox using asyncify: https://emscripten.org/docs/porting/asyncify.html.

You can use One Weird Trick with generator functions to make your code "generic" over synchronicity. I use this technique to avoid needing to implement both sync and async versions of some functions in my quickjs-emscripten library.

The great part about this technique as a library author is that unlike choosing to use a Promise return type, this technique is invisible in my public API. I can write a function like `export function coolAlgorithm(getData: (request: I) => O | Promise): R | Promise`, and we get automatic performance improvement if the user's function happens to return synchronously, without mystery generator stuff showing up in the function signature.

Helper to make a function that can be either sync or async: https://github.com/justjake/quickjs-emscripten/blob/ff211447...

Uses: https://cs.github.com/justjake/quickjs-emscripten?q=yield*+l...

This seems like a pretty nice, recently enabled way of getting a sandboxed js environment: QuickJS compiled to WASM: https://github.com/justjake/quickjs-emscripten.