sectorlisp VS wasm-bindgen

I'm assuming you are referring to https://github.com/jart/sectorlisp which I gather is an attempt to make a Lisp that fits in a disk boot sector?

I think SIMD was a distraction to our conversation, most code doesn't use it and in the future the length agnostic, flexible vectors; https://github.com/WebAssembly/flexible-vectors/blob/master/... are a better solution. They are a lot like RVV; https://github.com/riscv/riscv-v-spec, research around vector processing is why RISC-V exists in the first place!

I was trying to find the smallest Rust Wasm interpreters I could find, I should have read the source first, I only really use wasmtime, but this one looks very interesting, zero deps, zero unsafe.

16.5kloc of Rust https://github.com/rhysd/wain

The most complete wasm env for small devices is wasm3

20kloc of C https://github.com/wasm3/wasm3

I get what you are saying as to be so small that there isn't a place of bugs to hide.

> “There are two ways of constructing a software design: One way is to make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies, and the other way is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies. The first method is far more difficult.” CAR Hoare

Even a 100 line program can't be guaranteed to be free of bugs. These programs need embedded tests to ensure that the layer below them is functioning as intended. They cannot and should not run open loop. Speaking of 300+ reimplementations, I am sure that RISC-V has already exceeded that. The smallest readable implementation is like 200 lines of code; https://github.com/BrunoLevy/learn-fpga/blob/master/FemtoRV/...

I don't think Wasm suffers from the base extension issue you bring up. It will get larger, but 1.0 has the right algebraic properties to be useful forever. Wasm does require an environment, for archival purposes that environment should be written in Wasm, with api for instantiating more envs passed into the first env. There are two solutions to the Wasm generating and calling Wasm problem. First would be a trampoline, where one returns Wasm from the first Wasm program which is then re-instantiated by the outer env. The other would be to pass in the api to create new Wasm envs over existing memory buffers.

See, https://copy.sh/v86/

MS-DOS, NES or C64 are useful for archival purposes because they are dead, frozen in time along with a large corpus of software. But there is a ton of complexity in implementing those systems with enough fidelity to run software.

Lua, Typed Assembly; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Typed_assembly_language and Sector Lisp; https://github.com/jart/sectorlisp seem to have the right minimalism and compactness for archival purposes. Maybe it is sectorlisp+rv32+wasm.

If there are directions you would like Wasm to go, I really recommend attending the Wasm CG meetings.

https://github.com/WebAssembly/meetings

When it comes to an archival system, I'd like it to be able to run anything from an era, not just specially crafted binaries. I think Wasm meets that goal.

https://gist.github.com/dabeaz/7d8838b54dba5006c58a40fc28da9...

Based on this, the next thing you wrote, and your reference to running a minimal Gentoo: I think you might be a Scheme fan in the making. Scheme is the minimal Lisp. (Okay, that might be sectorlisp which fits in 512 bytes.) It’s hands down my favorite language. While it’s evolved on its own to be more of a superset of Scheme, Racket is my Scheme of choice.

sectorlisp

Another strange issue could be seen in the strict class heritage organized definition of the DOM, which can not be handled very well by rust because of a still unsolved bindgen issue (#210).

For a much simpler but less flexible approach there's wasm-pack for creating JS packages from Rust, and wasm-bindgen for easy interop. Both have very good documentation.

We encountered quite a few hurdles on our journey. For one, we had to build our own yew-webtransport and yew-websocket integration from scratch by adding WebTransport definitions to wasm-bindgen (pull request link). We also had to add WebTransport support to the h3 crate (pull request link). co-created by @ten3roberts

Go with your WebAssembly module idea. Since it sounds like your chess engine does not draw a UI, it shouldn't be too difficult. wasm-bindgen will be your best friend.

I've never tried it, but apparently some bindings exist, e.g. https://github.com/rustwasm/wasm-bindgen

So you can either try manipulating the DOM w/ some bindings or draw to canvas.

Google also brings up this GitHub issue.

If you want to learn more on wasm-pack, there is a wasm-pack book as well as some fairly detailed wasm-bindgen docs. There are a few resources for learning Rust itself in the December newsletter. Finally, please get in touch if you would like to see more content on Deno and Fresh. I hope you found the content useful and am keen to hear about possible improvements.

Love the article.

In my mind I see the problem of dynamic linking in rust to have a bunch of overlap with the "I want this rust library to be exposed in my higher level GC'd language with minimal safety/handwritten bindings" problem.

My hunch is that the lack of expressiveness of the C ABI is holding back both. the thing I'd love to see some sort of "higher level than the C ABI" come out. And something like `wasm-bindgen`[0] to exist for more languages.

Here's a link to the rust "interopable_api" proposal! I don't understand all the implications, but it seems to be in the right direction https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/pull/105586

[0]https://rustwasm.github.io/docs/wasm-bindgen/

Rust has https://github.com/rustwasm/wasm-bindgen and https://crates.io/crates/sledgehammer, the latter of which batches together JS calls to reduce the FFI cost. https://dioxuslabs.com/ uses these to great effect.

This seems like it could be super useful for integrating with wasm-bindgen and TypeScript. Last I checked, the types generated by wasm-bindgen left a lot to be desired (no disrespect intended, wasm-bindgen is an awesome project). A few years ago, I contributed the skip_typescript attribute to wasm_bindgen that allowed you to override the type generation by hand-writing your own types (using a custom typescript section), but I wonder if this could simply generate higher quality types without the manual intervention.