assemblyscript VS interface-types

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.

Some things that might greatly increase wasm usage and overall tooling:

1) Tools that run docker containers and serverless function services (like AWS lambda) to support providing a .wasm files instead

2) Garbage collection in the runtime to make GC languages easier to port to wasm

3) Dynamically typed languages (NodeJS, Python, Ruby) being able to compile to webassembly directly instead of porting the runtime to webassembly and then running the code through the runtime. This is a big ask though, basically needs to redesign the runtime completely

4) wasm-DOM bindings will enable other languages to do HTML rendering which will require new web frameworks for every language that wants to take over the space from JS. This will lead to (even more) fragmentation of the web ecosystem

5) A new wasm-first SDK (unrelated to the DOM) for building cross platform applications. I can see this taking off only if it is built-into the browsers and backed by some standards committee, so not very likely I think

6) Something like the Interface Types proposal ( https://github.com/WebAssembly/interface-types/blob/main/pro... ) becomes a thing allowing wasm programs to be consisted of modules written in several different languages and being able to call said modules with low or 0 runtime performance hit (and of course, no compilation to multiple CPU archs). So much of programming ecosystems are locked to specific languages (like data science with python) when there is little technical reason for it be like that.

AFAIK GC is irrelevant for "direct DOM access", you would rather want to hop into the following rabbit hole:

- reference types: https://github.com/WebAssembly/reference-types/blob/master/p...

- interface types (inactive): https://github.com/WebAssembly/interface-types/blob/main/pro...

- component model: https://github.com/WebAssembly/component-model

If this looks like a mess, that's because it is. Compared to that, the current solution to go through a Javascript shim doesn't look too bad IMHO.

I'm not really optimistic that particular aspect will get much improvement. Many people expected interface types to come save the day, but after a looong stagnation that proposal has been archived (for now) in favour of component types, which has much less potential for performance gains.

Really good questions. Unfortunately, most of the issues I found back then were fundamental ones. I've seen that Wasm has deprecated "Interface Types" and is now working on the "Component Model". But even then, as far as I understand that would only avoid the serialization and deserialization steps, and you would still need to copy complex types. It will be more performant, but I don't think it would be enough for Tremor either.

wasm doesn't know anything about the outside world on purpose. This allows it to be used in other domains. For direct access to the DOM et al, interface types are being developed. It's a non-trivial problem to interoperate with a dynamically typed GC'd language from any statically typed no-GC language that can compile to wasm.

You may want to look into WASM interface types, which is defining what amounts to am IDL for WASM and different languages have common calling conventions: https://hacks.mozilla.org/2019/08/webassembly-interface-type...

I don’t know if there’s a better intro article. I believe this is the current iteration of the proposal: https://github.com/WebAssembly/interface-types/blob/main/pro...

Yes, and if I'm not mistaken, this is the RFC

I see no reason why not. See the interface types proposal for a proposed solution.

Wanted to get thoughts from the Rust experts on this - the author of the Yew framework seems to think that Web Assembly Interface Types (https://github.com/WebAssembly/interface-types/blob/master/proposals/interface-types/Explainer.md) will allow Yew to eventually become faster than Vue, React, Angular, etc. Is there general consensus on this in the Rust community? The prospect of mixing Rust (for the performance critical pieces) with TS on the front end doesn't seem super appealing to me.