assemblyscript VS interface-types

This is probably the closest thing to that: https://www.assemblyscript.org/

We're going to write a fictional (and minimal!) firmware for our smart thermostat, let's assume we decided to use AssemblyScript (but it could have been in C, Rust, Go or any other supported language):

and have that just work without any JS "glue code". Maybe someday. I know they're working on the DOM APIs, but as you said, it's been slow going. Feels like priorities are elsewhere. Even CSS is moving forward with new features faster than WASM is (nesting and view transitions are awesome though).

(Btw when I said "separate runtime type checking" I didn't mean language-level; I was referring to the validation libraries that are required today since TS types obviously no longer exist after build. If it were a real static language, then of course you wouldn't need to do that because you can't store a bool in a string in the first place.)

[0]: https://www.assemblyscript.org/ (Porffor looks neat too. Wonder if it could be useful in plugin architectures? E.g. plugins can written in JS, and the program only needs a WASM interpreter. I'll bookmark it. Thanks.)

Built a platform flibbert.com where you can run code on ESP32 microcontrollers in AssemblyScript and TinyGo. It’s great for trying things out or learning without the usual setup hassle. Would love for people to try it and share feedback! (The project is on early stage, tested only on esp32-cam)

I get your point but one of the advantage of WASM is the compile step. It means that the WASM code will load and start running much faster because the browser gets a ready made binary to execute.

But yes, having the need for special tooling is a pain. My understanding is that AssemblyScript[0] allows to write code that look like Typescript and integrate well with the node ecosystem. Could be worth a look.

In case you start with a WAT file, there are ways to compile WAT to WASM in the browser[1].

[0] https://www.assemblyscript.org/

[1] https://webassembly.github.io/wabt/demo/wat2wasm/

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...

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.