nitro VS design

Looks similar to Nitro https://nitro.h2o.ai/ and Wave https://wave.h2o.ai/ - both open source. Nitro already works with WebAssembly via Pyodide. (Author here)

Does PyScript offer anything of significance over and above what Pyodide already offers, other than several py-* tags?

In my experience, it's trivial accomplish this with Pyodide.

Here's a web worker that hosts Pyodide and loads packages, PyPI wheels, external modules, etc. and launches type=text/python script tags in-browser:

https://github.com/h2oai/nitro/blob/main/web/public/nitride....

About ~100 lines of code.

I miss RAD tools too. Visual Basic was hugely popular two decades ago. The ease of building GUIs was unparalleled. That experience carried over to some extent with Windows Forms, WPF, Adobe Flex, etc., but not quite the same.

A decent blend of RAD and visual programming is the Max/MSP that ships with Ableton Live. It's fairly straightforward to build little audio/MIDI devices, then switch to visual programming for the implementation (objects/patchcords/control in Max terms).

> Doing GUIs only in code is tedious and boring.

Totally. But given that most GUI software these days involves client/server, I'm not sure if there's a simpler solution.

I work on Nitro[1] these days, and it's an attempt to make GUI development simpler and less tedious, primarily by trying to abstract away client/server programming and opting for a simpler way to program UIs without dealing with callbacks or event-handlers.

[1] https://github.com/h2oai/nitro

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

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.

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.

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.

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...

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....

> 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.

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