brassica VS proposals

I’ve done something like this before to call Haskell from C++ (in [0]), so that I can build my GUI using Qt. It worked pretty well, except that I ran into various difficult-to-resolve linking problems on both Windows and Linux. After a year or two of trying to maintain it, I gave up and switched to a protocol where both sides pass JSON over stdin/stdout. This particular piece of software doesn’t require a huge amount of communication or shared data, so it works well enough.

The really nice thing about the original interop code, though, is that GHC’s new WASM backend uses essentially the same foreign function interface to export functions to JavaScript. So with only some minor modifications, I was able to get the same program working on a webpage [1], which I think is pretty cool.

[0] https://github.com/bradrn/brassica

[1] At the risk of DDOS’ing my poor little home server: https://bradrn.com/brassica/

GHC’s WASM backend is already really useful! I also used it to port one of my own programs to the browser [0], albeit not using the DOM as this person did. Documentation is still sparse, but it’s a very similar process to creating a shared foreign library.

[0] https://github.com/bradrn/brassica

No experience with Rust, but for a couple of personal projects I’ve written the logic in Haskell and the GUI in C++ (e.g. https://github.com/bradrn/brassica/blob/master/ARCHITECTURE....). It works pretty well, at least for smaller projects — the basic idea is that the Haskell code gets compiled into a library (static on Windows, dynamic on Linux) which the C++ side can link to. I’d imagine doing the same with Rust would be even easier, since it’s less of a pain to marshal stuff across the language barrier.

The biggest one for me is undoubtedly my custom keyboard layout Conkey [0], which I use constantly (including for typing this very comment). I hate the way the base US layout tends to get distorted in other keyboard layouts with good support for non-ASCII characters, so Conkey had the explicit goal of retaining that basic unshifted layout. I’ve also ended up porting Conkey to Mac and Linux — and given that I’m slowly switching from Windows to Linux, at least the Linux ports have ‘scratched my own itch’ too, which is nice.

Also, I made a utility to archive the full text of every website I view and store it in a SQLite database for searching. It’s proven pretty useful when I want to find something I saw a while ago and then forgot. (I haven’t attempted to open-source it, though — it consists of three entirely separate components, two of which were a pain to set up. I must try to get it into a more usable state one of these days.)

What else… my sound change applier [1], perhaps? Not that I use it very much, because I only need it on those occasions when I want to do some conlanging, which I haven’t had much time for recently. Actually, sound change appliers strike me as being very much a ‘scratch own itch’ type of project in general… sometimes it feels like every conlanger has written their own, and no two can agree on a nice design. Everyone just has their own unique preferred way of doing things.

[0] https://github.com/bradrn/Conkey

[1] https://github.com/bradrn/brassica

Recently I’ve been trying to do some GTK+ programming again, as a change from my more recent attempts to use Qt with Haskell. Alas, when I try to build the example application from the documentation, I get an error:

Block only. There’s a tail call proposal[1] that’s in phase 4 (nearly standardized).

[1]: https://github.com/WebAssembly/proposals

While it'd be a nice addition, I wouldn't expect it any time soon.

It's currently still a stage 1 proposal, while we've been waiting for years for other proposals to be merged. The last time a proposal was actually finished was over 2 years ago.

https://github.com/WebAssembly/proposals

https://github.com/WebAssembly/proposals/blob/main/finished-...

Do you know anything about any WASM developments that will enable pure WASM interaction with browser's Web-APIs at no or at a low cost without the JS layer? I'm looking at https://github.com/WebAssembly/proposals and it's very confusing. There are type imports, almost complete GC proposal(which apparently only for GCd languages, but not for anything browser<->wasm), the component model(which looks and sounds as something not for the browser use case), JS String Builtins (which will provide faster JS strings, but not DOM) and ECMAScript module integration (which will turn WASM modules into ES modules, but Web-APIs aren't ES modules so no luck). Sometimes I read contributor interactions and it looks as if providing such functionality isn't their priority or even in their plans, and WASI + component model for cloud and similar use cases are more important.

It's already in Phase 4, so close: https://github.com/WebAssembly/proposals#phase-4---standardi...

Threads are Phase 3

https://github.com/WebAssembly/proposals

You can also check out:

https://webassembly.org/roadmap/

And for Go, the proposal project on Github has many interesting conversations from the devs.

And as a reminder to anyone interested in using Go WASM, it’s experimental and does not come with the same compatibility promise as Go itself:

https://github.com/golang/go/wiki/WebAssembly

GC proposal is from 2018: https://github.com/WebAssembly/proposals/issues/16 and there’s code: https://github.com/WebAssembly/gc/blob/master/proposals/gc/O...

Seems like an awefully long time for progress to be made, given all the possibilities it would unlock.

The proposal was recently bumped to stage 4 (the penultimate stage) with at least a couple of runtimes working on implementing (besides v8, which has supported it for quite awhile now)

https://github.com/WebAssembly/proposals

But basically it boils down to the memory control proposal, which can be found here and is not very far along; Webassembly proposals lists it in stage one.

Here's the full tab list: - https://tjpalmer.github.io/languish/ - https://blog.python.org/2022/10/python-3110-is-now-available.html - https://devblogs.microsoft.com/python/python-311-faster-cpython-team/ - https://github.com/tc39/proposals/blob/main/finished-proposals.md - https://devblogs.microsoft.com/typescript/ten-years-of-typescript/ - https://devblogs.microsoft.com/typescript/announcing-typescript-4-6/#cfa-destructured-discriminated-unions - https://devblogs.microsoft.com/typescript/announcing-typescript-4-9/#the-satisfies-operator - https://devblogs.microsoft.com/typescript/announcing-typescript-4-7/#go-to-source-definition - https://devblogs.microsoft.com/typescript/announcing-typescript-4-8/#build-watch-incremental-improvements - https://openjdk.org/projects/jdk/18/ - https://openjdk.org/projects/jdk/19/ - https://blog.jetbrains.com/clion/2022/07/july-2022-iso-cpp/ - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C%2B%2B23 - https://en.cppreference.com/w/cpp/23 - https://www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg21/docs/papers/2021/p2128r6.pdf - https://devblogs.microsoft.com/dotnet/announcing-dotnet-7/ - https://devblogs.microsoft.com/dotnet/welcome-to-csharp-11/ - https://devblogs.microsoft.com/dotnet/announcing-fsharp-7/ - https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/core/deploying/native-aot/ - https://go.dev/blog/go1.19 - https://go.dev/blog/go1.18 - https://thephd.dev/c23-is-coming-here-is-what-is-on-the-menu - https://thephd.dev/c23-is-coming-here-is-what-is-on-the-menu#n3017---embed - https://thephd.dev/c23-is-coming-here-is-what-is-on-the-menu#n3006--n3007---type-inference-for-object-definitions - https://www.php.net/archive/2022.php#2022-12-08-1 - https://wiki.php.net/rfc/dnf_types - https://blog.rust-lang.org/ - https://blog.rust-lang.org/2022/01/13/Rust-1.58.0.html#captured-identifiers-in-format-strings - https://blog.rust-lang.org/2022/02/24/Rust-1.59.0.html#inline-assembly - https://blog.rust-lang.org/2022/05/19/Rust-1.61.0.html#more-capabilities-for-const-fn - https://blog.rust-lang.org/2022/08/11/Rust-1.63.0.html#scoped-threads - https://blog.rust-lang.org/2022/11/03/Rust-1.65.0.html#generic-associated-types-gats - https://blog.jetbrains.com/kotlin/2022/06/kotlin-1-7-0-released/ - https://stat.ethz.ch/pipermail/r-announce/2022/000683.html - https://dart.dev/guides/whats-new - https://medium.com/dartlang/dart-2-18-f4b3101f146c - https://medium.com/dartlang/the-road-to-dart-3-afdd580fbefa - https://www.swift.org/blog/swift-5.6-released/ - https://www.swift.org/blog/swift-5.7-released/ - https://www.swift.org/blog/swift-language-updates-from-wwdc22/ - https://www.ruby-lang.org/en/news/2022/12/25/ruby-3-2-0-released/ - https://www.lua.org/news.html - https://www.scala-lang.org/blog/2022/09/05/scala-3.2.0-released.html - https://tjpalmer.github.io/languish/#y=mean&weights=issues%3D1%26pulls%3D0%26stars%3D1%26soQuestions%3D1&names=solidity%2Chaskell%2Cjulia%2Celixir%2Cclojure%2Cperl%2Cgroovy%2Cocaml%2Cgdscript%2Ccmake%2Cnix%2Cvisual+basic+.net - https://blog.soliditylang.org/ - https://downloads.haskell.org/~ghc/9.4.1/docs/users_guide/9.4.1-notes.html - https://julialang.org/blog/2022/08/julia-1.8-highlights/ - https://discourse.julialang.org/t/julia-v1-9-0-beta2-is-fast/92290 - https://elixir-lang.org/blog/2022/09/01/elixir-v1-14-0-released/ - https://elixir-lang.org/blog/2022/10/05/my-future-with-elixir-set-theoretic-types/ - https://clojure.org/news/2022/03/22/clojure-1-11-0 - https://godotengine.org/en/news/default/1 - https://ocaml.org/news/ocaml-5.0 - https://tjpalmer.github.io/languish/#y=mean&weights=issues%3D1%26pulls%3D0%26stars%3D1%26soQuestions%3D1&names=gdscript%2Czig%2Cpascal%2Cfortran%2Cnim%2Cf%23%2Ccommon+lisp%2Cwebassembly%2Ccrystal%2Ccython%2Cvala%2Cerlang%2Chaxe%2Cv%2Cd - https://ziglang.org/download/0.10.0/release-notes.html - https://ziglang.org/news/goodbye-cpp/ - https://nim-lang.org/blog.html - https://nim-lang.org/blog/2022/12/21/version-20-rc.html - https://www.erlang.org/news/157 - https://github.com/WebAssembly/proposals/commits/main - https://github.com/crystal-lang/crystal/releases - https://dlang.org/changelog/2.099.0.html - https://dlang.org/changelog/2.100.0.html - https://dlang.org/changelog/2.101.0.html - https://github.com/odin-lang/Odin/releases - https://gleam.run/news/ - https://gleam.run/news/gleam-v0.22-released/ - https://gleam.run/news/gleam-v0.24-released/ - https://github.com/idris-lang/Idris2/blob/102d7ebc18a9e881021ed4b05186cccda5274cbe/CHANGELOG.md - https://github.com/diku-dk/futhark/blob/master/CHANGELOG.md#02111 - https://grain-lang.org/blog/2022/06/06/new-release-grain-v0.5-durum/ - https://rescript-lang.org/blog/release-10-0-0 - https://www.roc-lang.org/ - https://simon.peytonjones.org/assets/pdfs/haskell-exchange-22.pdf - https://vale.dev/ - https://www.val-lang.dev/