pyodide VS emscripten

Compare pyodide vs emscripten and see what are their differences.

pyodide

Pyodide is a Python distribution for the browser and Node.js based on WebAssembly (by iodide-project)

emscripten

Emscripten: An LLVM-to-WebAssembly Compiler (by emscripten-core)
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pyodide emscripten
66 20
11,214 25,006
2.0% 0.9%
9.7 9.9
about 4 hours ago 7 days ago
Python C++
Mozilla Public License 2.0 GNU General Public License v3.0 or later
The number of mentions indicates the total number of mentions that we've tracked plus the number of user suggested alternatives.
Stars - the number of stars that a project has on GitHub. Growth - month over month growth in stars.
Activity is a relative number indicating how actively a project is being developed. Recent commits have higher weight than older ones.
For example, an activity of 9.0 indicates that a project is amongst the top 10% of the most actively developed projects that we are tracking.

pyodide

Posts with mentions or reviews of pyodide. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2024-03-15.

emscripten

Posts with mentions or reviews of emscripten. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2024-01-30.
  • Python HTTP library 'urllib3' now works in the browser
    8 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 30 Jan 2024
    Browsers limit the ability for these platforms to use raw sockets, there simply is no API for it. The best that can be done /today/ is to use WebSockets, which are not the same thing any can't be used for HTTP requests without the server expecting a WebSocket connection:

    https://github.com/emscripten-core/emscripten/issues/5196#is...

  • A minimal working Rust / SDL2 / WASM browser game
    6 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 15 Jan 2024
    Only half true. Emscripten implements the SDL 1.2 (and also SDL_mixer 1.2) API in Javascript here: https://github.com/emscripten-core/emscripten/blob/main/src/.... On the other hand SDL 2 (and SDL_mixer 2) are proper ports (which you linked to).

    So there's quite a size penalty to using SDL 2 rather than SDL 1.2.

    6 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 15 Jan 2024
    That is not true, SDL2 port is written in C and it has to be compiled.

    Here's where it's built

    https://github.com/emscripten-core/emscripten/blob/main/tool...

  • Playing with low-level memory in WebAssembly
    2 projects | dev.to | 5 Sep 2023
    Playing with low-level stuff is fun, but I won't use it anywhere in productionable code. Well, at least without considerable experience and understanding of the Emscripten code base.
  • Keeping Figma Fast: perf-testing the WASM editor
    5 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 30 Aug 2023
    Thank you for your comment!

    WASM gave Figma a lot of speed by default for a lot of perf-sensitive code like rendering, layouts, applying styles and materializing component instances, our GUI code is mostly React and CSS.

    WASM engine performance has not been a problem for us, instead we are constantly looking forward improvements in the devex department: debugging, profiling and modularization.

    One of the largest challenges of the platform we face today is the heap size limit. While Chrome supports up to 4GB today, that's not yet the case for all browsers. And even with that, we are still discovering bugs in the toolchain (see this recent issue filed by one of our engineers) https://github.com/emscripten-core/emscripten/issues/20137

    The challenge of the perf-testing at scale in our company is helping developers to detect perf regressions when they don't expect them - accidental algorithmic errors, misused caches, over-rendering React components, dangerously inefficient CSS directives, etc.

  • Show HN: Classic FPS Wolfenstein 3D brought in the browser via Emscripten
    7 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 3 Mar 2023
  • Hello World In Web Assembly
    4 projects | dev.to | 12 Feb 2023
    Moving onto the project, let’s first install Emscripten from their git repository. Emscripten will compile C into Wasm code. An important note is that I will be using Mac OS for this project. If you want to follow along using Windows, use this link. To Begin, open your terminal and clone down Emscripten with:
  • Question about usage on a chromebook
    4 projects | /r/i2p | 30 Nov 2022
    If you want to do it, go to town. This is the only reference I could find to anybody targeting wasm with i2pd frankly I really hope the person inquiring in the issue is also you.
  • The Reason Java Is Still Popular
    2 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 22 Sep 2022
    Right, and if that momentum is going to last 20 years, then that's going to dictate what's a good strategic decision and what isn't for the next 20 years. Thanks for letting me know what the good options might be when my infant daughter is halfway through college, that doesn't help me save for it in the meantime.

    Prior familiarity is a very good reason to pick an option for a greenfield project if you're operating on any type of serious budget (time or money), especially if you need to hire others to help out. There's also the annoying reality that most libraries for new/up-and-coming languages are simply inadequate, despite whatever claims they make.

    For instance, one of my personal side projects involves getting familiar with WebAssembly (note: not on a serious budget), and I'm using emscripten to transcode because that's what the internet seemed to think was the closest thing to a standard toolkit. I found a bug simply by combining two pieces of example code from Emscripten's own documentation (you'll note I'm transcoding from c++ due to prior familiarity): https://github.com/emscripten-core/emscripten/issues/17143

    This is not a dig on emscripten per se, merely pointing out that it's probably not mature enough for the stress of corporate-scale development, where you encounter all sorts of crazy edge cases well beyond the sample code. Java over the years has obtained that level of maturity. The edge cases are largely solved or at least known, and there's an army of experts and consultants ready to help if there's a problem. When time is money, that matters. It determines the risk profile of any project, greenfield or otherwise.

    Java's momentum hasn't stopped, at best it's simply slowing. And at this rate it'll take decades to come to a stop, and decades more to recede to any meaningful degree. I'll also point out that C is very much alive and well in the embedded world. Plenty of job postings looking for C experience explicitly.

  • Accessing WebAssembly reference-typed arrays from C++
    2 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 23 Aug 2022
    A proper solution for this problem will also help with the WebGPU API. Mapping a GPU resource returns a JS array view, which currently requires copying to and from the WASM heap (for instance see here in Emscripten's WebGPU shim: https://github.com/emscripten-core/emscripten/blob/37aa752eb...).

    Ideally the array view could either be mapped directly into the WASM heap, or at least would be accessible from the C/C++/Rust side with a special pointer type (maybe WASM should get address space segmetation like back in the 286 days lol).

What are some alternatives?

When comparing pyodide and emscripten you can also consider the following projects:

brython - Brython (Browser Python) is an implementation of Python 3 running in the browser

pyscript - Try PyScript: https://pyscript.com Examples: https://tinyurl.com/pyscript-examples Community: https://discord.gg/HxvBtukrg2

RustPython - A Python Interpreter written in Rust

streamlit - Streamlit β€” A faster way to build and share data apps.

Transcrypt - Python 3.9 to JavaScript compiler - Lean, fast, open! -

PyWebIO - Write interactive web app in script way.

opencv_py

jupyterlite - Wasm powered Jupyter running in the browser πŸ’‘

gpuweb - Where the GPU for the Web work happens!

jupyter - Jupyter metapackage for installation, docs and chat

compute-shader-101 - Sample code for compute shader 101 training

webview - Tiny cross-platform webview library for C/C++. Uses WebKit (GTK/Cocoa) and Edge WebView2 (Windows).