threads VS jupyterlite

Similarly for threads: https://github.com/webassembly/threads

Specifically I submitted this to draw attention to the latest comment in the thread: https://github.com/WebAssembly/threads/issues/177

It's a good deep dive into how a small, but well-intentioned, browser choice nearly a decade ago led to poor outcomes for the WebAssembly ecosystem.

The answer is: it's complicated. Which is most of the time the answer in the WASI world.

For this case it's complicated because some runtime supports https://github.com/WebAssembly/threads which mostly contains things like the spec for atomic but not the actual "threads" specs and then some runtimes (i.e wasmtime) also supports https://github.com/WebAssembly/wasi-threads which is one version of the threads. But a new proposal came into play https://github.com/abrown/thread-spawn so ... it's complicated.

There’s a proposal for threads

WebAssembly is having/going to have threads

https://github.com/WebAssembly/threads

It's disappointing to see the WebAssembly/threads proposal is still only in proposal state, despite existing since 2018. It being just a proposal stops languages like golang from actually implementing support for it, despite Chrome supporting it since v70.

Ah, I should have clarified that I mean the assembly instructions for atomics, rather than the JavaScript API. I.e. the opcodes listed here: https://github.com/WebAssembly/threads/blob/master/proposals...

Another point to add here is that the current wasm specification does not support threads although there is a proposal to add one. So I imagine that till the wasm specification includes it, we will continue to have only single threaded canisters.

The JupyterLite Python-compiled-to-WASM build has NumPy, SciPy, matplotlib, and SymPy installed; so you can do computer algebra with SymPy in a browser tab.

https://JupyterLite.rtfd.io/

https://github.com/jupyterlite/jupyterlite/tree/main/py/jupy... :

> Initial support for interactive visualization libraries such as: altair, bqplot, ipywidgets, matplotlib, and plotly

https://jupyterlite.readthedocs.io/en/latest/howto/extension... :

> We recommend checking out how to create a server extension first

From https://github.com/jupyterlite/jupyterlite/issues/237#issuec... re: 'micropip':

  %pip install $@

https://github.com/emscripten-forge/recipes/tree/main/recipe...

Re: emscripten fs implementations: https://github.com/emscripten-core/emscripten/issues/15041#i... https://github.com/jupyterlite/jupyterlite/issues/315

Agreed that would be a killer feature. Unzip this package and get a functional Python + Jupyter + scientific (numpy, pandas, scipy, matplotlib) environment.

I have been on-and-off teaching some people Python and the initial setup on-ramp is horrible. Ok, so install Python, now ignore-this-for-now-complications: create a "virtualenv", use this thing called "pip", install these half-dozen things to get a basic notebook (Jupyter + scipy things), install these other half-dozen quality of life things, you should probably also have "conda" for the future, etc. That's a lot of nonsense for someone I am trying to show an alternative to Excel.

My shortcut, "You want to try Python?" approach has been to start with JupyterLite[0] where I can immediately get people coding and delay that pain.

[0] https://github.com/jupyterlite/jupyterlite

JupyterLite: a JupyterLab distribution that runs in the browser\ (45 comments)