browser_wasi_shim VS webassembly-language-runtimes

There are many options, but what worked best for me is compiling with cargo-wasi and loading the resulting Wasm file with browser_wasi_shim. Using wasm32-wasi instead of wasm32-unknown-unknown requires a bit more work (the communication with JS has to be set up manually), but gives the flexibility of having just a Wasm file that can be dropped in and loaded dynamically. (There's wit-bindgen for generating wrapping code according to an interface definition but I didn't have much success with it.)

The webassembly-language-runtimes is focused on providing WASI-based language interpreters, what would require a WASI polyfill at the browser level (https://wasi.dev/polyfill/) and (https://github.com/bjorn3/browser_wasi_shim).

Pyodide is certainly another option, but is emscripten based, not based in webassembly-language-runtimes or WASI.

Indeed, some people are doing this:

- WASI once had an official polyfill https://wasi.dev/polyfill/, now apparently succeeded by https://github.com/bjorn3/browser_wasi_shim

- wasmer-js provides a JS polyfill for WASI https://docs.wasmer.io/integrations/js/wasi

- Cloudflare has a WIP polyfill https://github.com/cloudflare/workers-wasi

I'm generally leery of non-temporary polyfills, so I'm not sure that any of these feel like a long-term viable option for me.

Browser client library uses browser_wasi_shim to communicate with the module.

> so I wonder if there's something holding back Python + WASM

Yes. The problem is that may python libraries involve compilation of c, rust or other native languages that themselves need a WASM toolchain configured to cross compile to WASM correctly, and potentially patches to support the platform.

This toolchain support is coming though. See pyodide.org for one example.

But if you just want to grab python.wasm from somewhere and run it on the cli, take a look at something like https://github.com/vmware-labs/webassembly-language-runtimes...

WMWare labs [1] managed to compile Python/Ruby/PHP into WASM distribution. This works if you want to run the language interpreter but is limited when you want your WASM runtime (host) to run in parallel of your own program. This leads to the creation of the "reactor" concept by the community [2].

In the python WASI reactor, we load the libpython compiled for WASM and add a Rust reactor layer. Currently, it supports dynamic registration of Python lambdas and we are working on adding support for whole functions/packages.

[1] https://github.com/vmware-labs/webassembly-language-runtimes

The Python builds from the WebAssembly language runtimes [0] project target the WebAssembly System Interfaces (WASI) [1]. It allows the Python interpreter to interact with resources like the filesystem.

Many server-side Wasm runtimes supports WASI out of the box. For the browser, you need to provide a polyfill to emulate these resources like the one provided by the WASI team [2].

Regarding SQLite, these builds include libsqlite so you should be able to use it :)

- [0] https://github.com/vmware-labs/webassembly-language-runtimes

- [1] https://wasi.dev/

- [2] https://wasi.dev/polyfill/

Hello salaboy

Of course getting and gems etc gets weird in wasm..

Anyway, thanks to VMware labs for publishing interpreter wasm builds, people can play around. https://github.com/vmware-labs/webassembly-language-runtimes...

Random, but enjoy.

Hey! A WasmLabs team member here :). We're planning to port several runtimes as part of our WebAssembly Language Server initiative [1]. Porting things to Wasm+WASI is sometimes challenging. There are some deep-dives in our blog around this topic [2].

[1] https://github.com/vmware-labs/webassembly-language-runtimes...

[2] https://wasmlabs.dev/articles/php-wasm32-wasi-port/