assemblyscript VS AECforWebAssembly

I like your take but JavaScript was literally the assembly language of the web until WASM came along. There was no other language that TypeScript could compile to.

This train of thought lead me to discover AssemblyScript! https://www.assemblyscript.org/

Incidentally, it’s also what AssemblyScript uses: https://github.com/AssemblyScript/assemblyscript/blob/main/s...

Use it as a Front-End for other low-level languages.

> MHO typescript could just cut loose from its javascript compatibility. Why not compile it to wasm instead of transpiling it to javascript?

Check out AssemblyScript which is exactly that:

https://www.assemblyscript.org/

If you're curious, check out AssemblyScript, that might describe better what needs to be cut from TypeScript to make it possible to be compiled to WASM.

This is kinda the idea behind AssemblyScript, but IIRC it's more of a low-level typescript-ish syntax for WebAssembly.

https://www.assemblyscript.org/ maybe, but I'm not sure exactly what you need.

Exactly, WASM was designed to be very very lightweight... you can put a lot of logic into a very small amount of WASM, but you need a good compiler to do that, or write WASM by hand to really feel the benefit. If you just compile Go to WASM, with its GC, runtime and stdlib included in the binary, yeah it's going to be pretty heavy... Rust doesn't have a runtime but as you said, for some reason, produces relatively large binaries (not the case only in WASM by the way). Probably, the best ways to create small WASM binaries is to compile from C or from a WASM-native language like AssemblySCript (https://www.assemblyscript.org).

Well we have all the new ECMA standards that will be introduced in 5 years now. It's looking more like Java actually. its accessor and typing patterns match it the most. TypeScript has had quite the profound influence over future ECMA design. There is a not so well known project called AssemblyScript which I think has a promising future. Since future ecma standards closely resembles it and TypeScripts popularity has exploded I have a feeling it may become a real standard as well.

Great! I have not yet made source maps for my programming language that compiles to WebAssembly, and I probably never will.

Up until today, my AEC-to-WebAssembly was, if somebody tried to use two structures of different types as the second and the third operand to the ?: (ternary conditional) operator, as in this example: ``` Structure First Consists Of Nothing; EndStructure

Well, I have written the first compiler for my programming language, targetting x86, in IE6-compatible JavaScript, and the second compiler, targetting WebAssembly, has been written in C++11. I think that, to choose a language to write a compiler in, you need to look at at least two things:

You can see the releases v2.5.3 and v2.5.2 of AECforWebAssembly on GitHub. They are produced with the same version of GCC, the only difference (as far as I know) is that v2.5.2 was produced directly on Debian, whereas v2.5.3 was cross-compiled from Windows to Linux using Docker.

That could be true. I host my AEC-to-WebAssembly compiler on GitHub, GitLab and SourceForge, and it's only on GitHub that it has 21 stars and 2 forks. On GitLab and SourceForge, it has zero of both.

Well, the main compiler for my programming language is targetting the JavaScript Virtual Machine by outputting WebAssembly. I think it's even better than targetting Java Virtual Machine, because, for one thing, your executables can run in any modern browser if you output WebAssembly. If you target Java Virtual Machine, the users need to actually download your app. Furthermore, there is an official assembler for WebAssembly called WebAssembly Binary Toolkit (WABT), so your compiler can output assembly and not have to deal with binary files. There is nothing equivalent to that for Java Virtual Machine.