pyodide VS Transcrypt

Very cool! Kind of seems like a relic at this point though, cool for studying but probably better to use Pyodide [1] in practice? This is what powers JupyterLite [2], which is a fully fledged Jupyter IDE with support for packages, in browser.

1: https://github.com/pyodide/pyodide

2: https://github.com/jupyterlite/jupyterlite

We implemented an in-browser Python editor/interpreter built on Pyodide over at Comet (our users are data scientists who need to build custom visualizations quite often, and the most familiar language for most of them is Python).

One of the issues you'll run into is that Pyodide only works by default with packages that have pure Python wheels available. The team has developed support for some libraries with C dependencies (like scikit-learn, I believe), but frameworks like PyTorch are particularly thorny (see this issue: https://github.com/pyodide/pyodide/issues/1625 )

We ended up rolling out a new version of our Python visualizations that runs off-browser, in order to support enough libraries/get the performance we need: https://www.comet.com/docs/v2/guides/comet-ui/experiment-man...

Thank you! Yes, one of the items in the Roadmap is support for Pyodide (https://github.com/pyodide/pyodide) for running in-browser python on the results of each of the code blocks! This should allow most ML libs to be usable in-browser! This is pretty high-up on our priority list.

If I understand correctly, WASM only makes sense for compiled languages, you can run the python interpreter in WASM of course[1], but that will be at a significant performance disadvantage to the native javascript interpreter, and it's also something that has to be loaded every time you load the website.

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

If you absolutely need something comparable to Sympy, then one option might be to figure out how to best call Sympy from Rust. e.g. - RustPython, although it seems like Sympy isn't supported yet - Pyodide, and figuring out how to run it outside of a web browser. Probably also not very easy. - PyPy, and having a pretty simple Python binary for every platform - ...

For running programming languages other than JavaScript in the browser there is Emscripten and WebAssembly. There is v86, where a Linux build is compiled to WASM. Folks have written QuickJS into a Linux build compiled to WASM, Node.js into the Linux buildroot https://github.com/cemalgnlts/now, so Python or CPython can be written to the image and loaded into the browser as WASM as well https://github.com/pyodide/pyodide.

There's a Python runtime that runs on WebAssembly (https://github.com/pyodide/pyodide). I have no idea what it's like, I've never used it.

Still in a quest to provide some tooling to quickly compose documentation websites: https://github.com/synw/docdundee . As I have tons of libs to document and was tired of managing restructured language for readthedocs I started with this, and now it has executable Python examples in the frontend via a Pyodide wrapper composable: usePython

This is the primary difference between Pyodide and projects like Transcrypt or Brython: rather than transpiling to JavaScript, you get the real-deal CPython interpreter running client-side in the user's browser. There are a few things that don't work out of the box, since CPython usually runs on a computer and the Browser environment has some unique restrictions (lack of low-level access to networking, for one), but most things do just work.

In the past, I've personally used GWT to transpile Java to JavaScript in order to share some complex code modules that we needed to use on both the server and client for an enterprise application. In more recent years, I've been using Transcrypt to develop React/MUI applications that are coded in Python. So I'm able to use JS libraries that are proven to work great in a web browser, but use my preferred language to code to the API of those libraries. This approach is certainly not for everyone, but it can be a viable option in some cases.

I now use Python everywhere. Desktop (PySide), embedded (MicroPython), web dev (React via Transcrypt), mobile (Kivy), and just general scripting. I love the versatility of Python, the ease of reading it without the visual cruft of other languages, and the availability of existing libraries that do just about everything you can think of. I also agree with the OP on the welcoming attitude of the Python community. The fact that Python is used in so many different areas leads to many new learning experiences when talking to other Python developers.

Transcrypt is pretty usable for this.

Transcrypt transpiles Python into JavaScript in the same way that TypeScript gets transpiled into JavaScript. It lets Python code word with JavaScript libraries that can then be run in a web browser.

There are options for writing Python and transpiling it into JavaScript but, frankly, they suck (https://www.transcrypt.org/).

Lol, I'll tell you but you're not gonna like it - I write React applications in Python using a Python-to-JS transpiler called Transcrypt, and the source needs to be valid lintable Python code, so no JSX.

The Python AST module exists for this purpose and works by tokenizing individual pieces of the source code. It's also how transpilers such as Transcrypt work their magic to convert Python code to other languages.

https://github.com/qquick/Transcrypt