assemblyscript VS design-principles

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.

If you can guarantee that Typescript type hints will always be followed, you can turn it into more optimised code. Unfortunately, this means you've got to break Javascript semantics, so this means creating a new language, but people have done it. For example, AssemblyScript is a language that is designed as a strict subset of Typescript that compiles directly down to WebAssembly instead of Javascript, producing much more efficient code (most of the time). The tradeoff is that it has some slightly different semantics to Javascript, which means your existing codebase — and most of the libraries you use — will probably require some adaption before running correctly in AssemblyScript.

I am skeptical of WebAssembly and component-model myself, but that AssemblyScript page seems alarmist and as can be seen in several issues, dcodeIO (from the AssemblyScript community) was definitely not behaving in good faith: https://github.com/w3ctag/design-principles/issues/322

It seems most of the complaints are that selecting UTF-8 as a primary string encoding is "against the practices of the web", which seems patently absurd. I was definitely expecting more along the lines of object models integrating into component‐model, rather than mass-tagging people because of string encodings.

I don't agree with your representation that sanitisation of isolated surrogates constitutes "corruption". As a high-level point, when passing a string from your component to an external one, the external component receives a sanitised copy of your string - the original string is not modified in-place. So you still have access to your original string if you're relying on the presence of isolated surrogates for some reason.

For fairness, I will link below to your concrete example of "corruption", noting that you claim it will render Wasm "the biggest security disaster man ever created for everything". The fundamental bug is in splitting a string at a point which happens to be between two code points which make up an emoji. This kind of mistake can already cause logic and display errors in other parts of the code (e.g. for languages with non-BMP characters) independent of whether components are involved.

https://github.com/w3ctag/design-principles/issues/322