design
proposals
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design
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Rust, WASM, and LOK
First of all, a quick rundown of what WASM is. It stands for Web Assembly. In essence, similar to how Java compiles down to a bytecode that is interpreted by a Java Virtual Machine, Web Assembly is a different bytecode interpreted by the browser. Many different languages can compile into WASM, and Javascript can interface with it like a module. In my case, I wrote a lot of the source code in Rust and compiled it down to a WASM module, then called into it from Javascript.
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Surprisingly Powerful – Serverless WASM with Rust Article 1
WebAssembly (abbreviated Wasm) is a binary instruction format for a stack-based virtual machine. Wasm is designed as a portable compilation target for programming languages, enabling deployment on the web for client and server applications. - https://webassembly.org
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Reaching and surpassing the limits of JavaScript BigData with WebAssembly
With WebAssembly we can compile our C++ codebase into a wasm module for the browser. So when you look at a SciChart.js chart you're actually seeing our C++ graphics engine wrapped for JavaScript.
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WASM Instructions
I should add, however, that the unmentioned elephant in the room is V8 JIT (TurboFan), which simply doesn't handle irreducible control flow. While there are some valid theoretical arguments around the current arrangement in Wasm, looking at the history of the associated discussions makes it pretty obvious that having V8 support Wasm and generate fast code similar to what it can do for asm.js was an overriding concern in many cases. And Google straight up said that if Wasm has ICF, they will not bother supporting such cases, so it will be done by a much slower fallback:
https://github.com/WebAssembly/design/issues/796#issuecommen...
AFAIK no other Wasm implementation has the same constraint - the rest generally tend to desugar everything to jumps and then proceed from there. So this is, at least to some extent, yet another case of a large company effectively forcing an open standard to be more convenient for them specifically.
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Supercharge Web AI Model Testing: WebGPU, WebGL, and Headless Chrome
https://github.com/WebAssembly/design/issues/1397
> Currently allocating more than ~300MB of memory is not reliable on Chrome on Android without resorting to Chrome-specific workarounds, nor in Safari on iOS.
That's about allocating CPU memory but the GPU memory situation is similar.
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Build your own WebAssembly Compiler
As far as I can tell (5 minutes of internet research) this was to allow easier compilation to JavaScript as a fallback in the days when WASM wasn't widely supported.
"Please add goto" issue has been open since 2016:
https://github.com/WebAssembly/design/issues/796
Most interesting comment:
> The upcoming Go 1.11 release will have experimental support for WebAssembly. This will include full support for all of Go's features, including goroutines, channels, etc. However, the performance of the generated WebAssembly is currently not that good.
> This is mainly because of the missing goto instruction. Without the goto instruction we had to resort to using a toplevel loop and jump table in every function. Using the relooper algorithm is not an option for us, because when switching between goroutines we need to be able to resume execution at different points of a function. The relooper can not help with this, only a goto instruction can.
> It is awesome that WebAssembly got to the point where it can support a language like Go. But to be truly the assembly of the web, WebAssembly should be equally powerful as other assembly languages. Go has an advanced compiler which is able to emit very efficient assembly for a number of other platforms. This is why I would like to argue that it is mainly a limitation of WebAssembly and not of the Go compiler that it is not possible to also use this compiler to emit efficient assembly for the web.
^ https://github.com/WebAssembly/design/issues/796#issuecommen...
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Flawless – Durable execution engine for Rust
When I implemented a WASM compiler, the only source of float-based non-determinism I found was in the exact byte representation of NaN. Floating point math is deterministic. See https://webassembly.org/docs/faq/#why-is-there-no-fast-math-... and https://github.com/WebAssembly/design/blob/main/Nondetermini....
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Requiem for a Stringref
> To work with GC, you need some way to track if the GC'd object is accessible in WASM itself.
I've never heard of a GC with that kind of API. Usually any native code that holds a GC reference would either mark that reference as a root explicitly (eg. https://github.com/WebAssembly/design/issues/1459) or ensure that it can be traced from a parent object. Either way, this should prevent collection of the object. I agree that explicitly checking whether a GC'd object has been freed would not make any sense.
> The reason why you probably need a custom string type is so you can actually embed string literals without relying on interop with the environment.
WASM already has ways of embedding flat string data. This can be materialized into GC/heap objects at module startup. This must happen in some form anyway, as all GC-able objects must be registered with the GC upon creation, for them to be discoverable as candidates for collection.
Overall I still don't understand the issue. There is so much prior art for these patterns in native extensions for Python, PHP, Ruby, etc.
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The Tug-of-War over Server-Side WebAssembly
Giving you a buffer that grows is the allocation approach I am talking about. This is not how your OS works. Your OS itself works with an allocator that does a pretty good job making sure that your memory ends up not fragmented. Because WASM is in between, the OS is not in control of the memory, and instead the browser is. The browser implementation of "bring your own allocator" is cute but realistically just a waste of time for everybody who wants to deploy a wasm app because whatever allocator you bring is crippled by the overarching allocator of the browser messing everything up.
It seems like the vendors are recognizing this though, with firefox now having a discard function aparently!
https://github.com/WebAssembly/design/issues/1397
- How do Rust WebAssembly apps free unused memory?
proposals
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WASM Instructions
Block only. There’s a tail call proposal[1] that’s in phase 4 (nearly standardized).
[1]: https://github.com/WebAssembly/proposals
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Extism Makes WebAssembly Easy
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-...
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Show HN: Unity like game editor running in pure WASM
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.
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Haskell WebAssembly in the Browser
It's already in Phase 4, so close: https://github.com/WebAssembly/proposals#phase-4---standardi...
- WASM typed function references and GC are in standardization
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WASI Support in Go
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
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Learn WebAssembly by writing small programs
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.
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Directly compiling Scheme to WebAssembly: lambdas, recursion, iteration
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
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How do Rust WebAssembly apps free unused memory?
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.
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New video! 2022 in Programming Languages
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/
What are some alternatives?
content - The content behind MDN Web Docs
expresscpp - Fast, unopinionated, minimalist web framework for C++ Perfect for building REST APIs
wave - Realtime Web Apps and Dashboards for Python and R
binaryen - DEPRECATED in favor of ghc wasm backend, see https://www.tweag.io/blog/2022-11-22-wasm-backend-merged-in-ghc
interface-types
buttplug-rs - Rust Implementation of the Buttplug Sex Toy Control Protocol
Chevrotain - Parser Building Toolkit for JavaScript
ruffle - A Flash Player emulator written in Rust
WASI - WebAssembly System Interface
iswasmfast - Performance comparison of WebAssembly, C++ Addon, and native implementations of various algorithms in Node.js.
sdk - The Dart SDK, including the VM, dart2js, core libraries, and more.