mandelbrot VS extism

It is my conviction that the Web Stack is the most capable, mature, accessible, and performant way of building and running UIs. It is the sheer amount of effort spent by millions of people around the globe that makes it the best UI stack for the vast majority of use cases. Some say that the browser nowadays is the most complex piece of software that few organizations can make. And it has been a while since Chrome super optimized runtimes are capable of running JavaScript at near-native speeds and the WebKit rendering engine is more than ready to generate each frame in under 8ms achieving 120 FPS.

Not long ago I have created a Mandelbrot set generator in 13 programming languages, Python included. Why not test the most recent version on runtime there? It is a CPU bound benchmark that demonstrates how performant a given language is at executing lots of math computations in nested loops.

I tested this hypothesis with Mandelbrot calculation. I.e. I have implemented the same algorithm twice, the only difference being different variable types:

mandelbrot.py - baseline implementation

Extism can be really useful for packaging up and running cross-language libraries!

The most clear information about it is at: https://extism.org, but its a bit focused on the primary use case for Extism, being a universal plugin system.

There is a C PDK (https://github.com/extism/c-pdk) which you'd probably want to use in a new wrapper around your library in C++, and compile it to wasm32 freestanding or WASI, but without emscripten. Extism doesn't currently have an interop layer to emscripten.

It may just be my own unique obsession to peek at the internals of .wasm, but if anyone else is curious:

https://modsurfer.dylibso.com/module?hash=ab6f4b2de9db171347...

u/nbittich - curious if you've tried to use your language as as a scripting language inside other apps? I took a peak at your browser wasm environment, and think we could hook up the `compute` entrypoint you have here[0], but I'm not certain what the `ctx` does without going super deep, and if it could be passed into an Extism function[1] (which is how I'd try to run it from within 16+ other languages).

[0]: https://github.com/nbittich/adana/blob/master/adana-script-w...

[1]: https://github.com/extism/extism

Yep, this is one of the initial motivations for creating Extism: https://github.com/extism/extism -- and it works across 16 host languages & 8 guest languages.

On the devx, there's definitely some rough edges around building and using Wasm. My company has been working on a framework to ease integrating Wasm into existing applications. One area it focuses on is providing easy data passing between the host program and the Wasm and vice versa. https://github.com/extism/extism We do not have WASI preview 2 support yet, but are interested in integrating it.