trealla-js VS node-gyp

I think Prolog really shines as an embedded query engine (I know this is old and it's been removed since). It's perfect for declarative configuration, very easy to write powerful queries once you wrap your head around it.

The Yarn constraints plugin also used (Tau) Prolog, although it looks like it's in the process of being replaced with JS, which makes me a bit sad. The reasoning is here: https://github.com/yarnpkg/berry/issues/1276. Seems like the biggest issue is lack of a nice dev environment. I maintain the Trealla Prolog Wasm port (npm package 'trealla') and I hope some day to use it for a VSCode extension or LSP or something to provide a nice dev experience. Performance has also been cited as an issue[1] but Trealla is quite fast and I expect it could easily handle a complex Yarn workspace with tons of facts. If this sounds like something you'd be interested in helping me with, feel free to contact me or make an issue/discussion here: https://github.com/guregu/trealla-js

[1]: https://github.com/yarnpkg/berry/issues/4079#issuecomment-10...

port a C or Rust project to wasm and make a JS package for it (trealla-js is an example of such a package, porting a C Prolog interpreter to wasm)

Hey, this is mine. Thanks for submitting it. I'll answer some questions.

> Why?

I ported Trealla Prolog to WASM (WASI) and I was looking for something useful to test it against. I found Spin, which can run WASM+CGI, and landed on this. Making this project exposed a number of bugs in my port that have now been fixed, so consumers of more useful projects[1][2] benefit as well. Also, PHP style templates are just fun! There's something valuable to just being able to shove a little bit of code inside some HTML and get it up on the internet.

I started my webdev journey with PHP many many years ago, and it's nice to revisit it from a different perspective. I don't use the real (elephant) PHP anymore, but I've gained a newfound appreciation for how fun its quick & dirty development style is.

I hope this project can serve as an example of how to use Prolog for fun things. It does showcase some of the cooler dynamic aspects of the language, and the PHP parsing code is like 10 lines of DCG.

> Is it a joke?

Yes and no. The name is certainly a joke. I was pondering what 'Prolog on Rails' might be and thought calling it PHP would be funny. This led to the PHP-style templates which were quick to implement and pretty powerful. Despite the humorous presentation, it does actually work.

> Can you use Prolog for web services?

Yes! For example, SWI has a mature HTTP package: https://www.swi-prolog.org/pldoc/doc_for?object=section(%27p.... It's used to power SWISH, an online Prolog code sharing thing: https://swish.swi-prolog.org/

> Next steps?

I would like to support persistence somehow. I think it'd be really cool if you could use Prolog's dynamic database[3] as a persistent store. Spin has components for Postgres and Redis so it shouldn't be too hard to implement, but I lose the WASI compatibility if I do that... which means I can't use the binary from WAPM, etc.

I would also like to experiment with running Trealla on Cloudflare Workers. I have another project, worker-prolog[4], which uses Tau Prolog (a Prolog written in Javascript) on Workers.

On a somewhat related note, I've also been playing around with Cosmopolitan libc[5]. I got Trealla to compile to an APE executable but there's some issues with the embedded Prolog libraries getting garbled, so I need to improve my GDB skills and figure out what's going on there.

Finally, I'd like to say thanks to Andrew Davison (@infradig on GitHub), the author of Trealla Prolog, for letting me add WASM support to his project and helping me with lots of things. For example, PHP led to Andrew implementing improvements for using DCGs to parse Prolog terms, which is now super fast[6]!

[1]: https://github.com/guregu/trealla-js

[2]: https://github.com/trealla-prolog/go

[3]: https://www.swi-prolog.org/pldoc/man?predicate=assertz/1

[4]: https://github.com/guregu/worker-prolog

[5]: https://justine.lol/cosmopolitan/

[6]: https://github.com/trealla-prolog/trealla/issues/53

With trealla-prolog/go on the backend and trealla-js on the frontend, you can share the same validation code.

I found async generators to be handy while porting a C Prolog interpreter to WASM/JS. A `for await` loop is a natural way to iterate over query results, and as a bonus you can use `finally` within the iterator to automatically clean up resources (free memory). There are ways for determined users to leak (manually iterating and forgetting to call `.return()`) but I've found that setting a finalizer on a local variable inside of the generator seems to work :-). I can't say manual memory management is a common task in JS but it did the trick.

The generator in question, which is perhaps the gnarliest JS I've ever written: https://github.com/guregu/trealla-js/blob/887d200b8eecfca8ed...

The benefit of having it in JS is not speed but portability and access to the JS ecosystem of tools. Having the code run in the browser without needing a complex setup is a huge benefit for sharing demos. Node.js provides a way to use native code as well and it's quite commonly used https://github.com/nodejs/node-gyp so there's no reason you couldn't use those same or similar libraries in a JS implementation.

It is still possible to execute binaries made in other languages such as C/C++ by linking it dynamically as Native Addon Modules in Node.js using tools like node-gyp. But the execution in those case is done by the operating system, not the JS Engine.

npm ERR! A complete log of this run can be found in: C:\Users\ASUS\AppData\Local\npm-cache\_logs\2023-07-13T06_54_24_745Z-debug-0.log PS C:\Users\ASUS\Documents\Sample Project\Audio to Text\scripts> npm install @tensorflow/tfjs-node npm ERR! code 1 npm ERR! path C:\Users\ASUS\Documents\Sample Project\Audio to Text\node_modules\@tensorflow\tfjs-node npm ERR! command failed npm ERR! command C:\WINDOWS\system32\cmd.exe /d /s /c node scripts/install.js npm ERR! CPU-windows-4.8.0.zip npm ERR! https://storage.googleapis.com/tensorflow/libtensorflow/libtensorflow-cpu-windows-x86_64-2.9.1.zip npm ERR! node-pre-gyp install failed with error: Error: Command failed: node-pre-gyp install --fallback-to-build npm ERR! node-pre-gyp info it worked if it ends with ok npm ERR! node-pre-gyp info using [email protected] npm ERR! node-pre-gyp info using [email protected] | win32 | x64 npm ERR! node-pre-gyp info check checked for "C:\Users\ASUS\Documents\Sample Project\Audio to Text\node_modules\@tensorflow\tfjs-node\lib\napi-v8\tfjs_binding.node" (not found) npm ERR! node-pre-gyp http GET https://storage.googleapis.com/tf-builds/pre-built-binary/napi-v8/4.8.0/CPU-windows-4.8.0.zip npm ERR! node-pre-gyp ERR! install response status 404 Not Found on https://storage.googleapis.com/tf-builds/pre-built-binary/napi-v8/4.8.0/CPU-windows-4.8.0.zip npm ERR! node-pre-gyp WARN Pre-built binaries not installable for @tensorflow/[email protected] and [email protected] (node-v108 ABI, unknown) (falling back to source compile with node-gyp) npm ERR! node-pre-gyp WARN Hit error response status 404 Not Found on https://storage.googleapis.com/tf-builds/pre-built-binary/napi-v8/4.8.0/CPU-windows-4.8.0.zip npm ERR! gyp info it worked if it ends with ok npm ERR! gyp info using [email protected] npm ERR! gyp info using [email protected] | win32 | x64 npm ERR! gyp info ok npm ERR! gyp info it worked if it ends with ok npm ERR! gyp info using [email protected] npm ERR! gyp info using [email protected] | win32 | x64 npm ERR! gyp info find Python using Python version 3.7.9 found at "C:\Users\ASUS\AppData\Local\Microsoft\WindowsApps\PythonSoftwareFoundation.Python.3.7_qbz5n2kfra8p0\python.exe" npm ERR! gyp ERR! find VS npm ERR! gyp ERR! find VS msvs_version not set from command line or npm config npm ERR! gyp ERR! find VS VCINSTALLDIR not set, not running in VS Command Prompt npm ERR! gyp ERR! find VS checking VS2022 (17.6.33815.320) found at: npm ERR! gyp ERR! find VS "C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio\2022\BuildTools" npm ERR! gyp ERR! find VS - found "Visual Studio C++ core features" npm ERR! gyp ERR! find VS - missing any VC++ toolset npm ERR! gyp ERR! find VS could not find a version of Visual Studio 2017 or newer to use npm ERR! gyp ERR! find VS looking for Visual Studio 2015 npm ERR! gyp ERR! find VS - not found npm ERR! gyp ERR! find VS not looking for VS2013 as it is only supported up to Node.js 8 npm ERR! gyp ERR! find VS npm ERR! gyp ERR! find VS ************************************************************** npm ERR! gyp ERR! find VS You need to install the latest version of Visual Studio npm ERR! gyp ERR! find VS including the "Desktop development with C++" workload. npm ERR! gyp ERR! find VS For more information consult the documentation at: npm ERR! gyp ERR! find VS https://github.com/nodejs/node-gyp#on-windows npm ERR! gyp ERR! find VS ************************************************************** npm ERR! gyp ERR! find VS npm ERR! gyp ERR! configure error npm ERR! gyp ERR! stack Error: Could not find any Visual Studio installation to use npm ERR! gyp ERR! stack at VisualStudioFinder.fail (C:\Users\ASUS\AppData\Roaming\npm\node_modules\npm\node_modules\node-gyp\lib\find-visualstudio.js:122:47) npm ERR! gyp ERR! stack at C:\Users\ASUS\AppData\Roaming\npm\node_modules\npm\node_modules\node-gyp\lib\find-visualstudio.js:75:16 npm ERR! gyp ERR! stack at VisualStudioFinder.findVisualStudio2013 (C:\Users\ASUS\AppData\Roaming\npm\node_modules\npm\node_modules\node-gyp\lib\find-visualstudio.js:380:14) npm ERR! gyp ERR! stack at C:\Users\ASUS\AppData\Roaming\npm\node_modules\npm\node_modules\node-gyp\lib\find-visualstudio.js:71:14 npm ERR! gyp ERR! stack at C:\Users\ASUS\AppData\Roaming\npm\node_modules\npm\node_modules\node-gyp\lib\find-visualstudio.js:401:16 npm ERR! gyp ERR! stack at C:\Users\ASUS\AppData\Roaming\npm\node_modules\npm\node_modules\node-gyp\lib\util.js:54:7 npm ERR! gyp ERR! stack at C:\Users\ASUS\AppData\Roaming\npm\node_modules\npm\node_modules\node-gyp\lib\util.js:33:16 npm ERR! gyp ERR! stack at ChildProcess.exithandler (node:child_process:427:5) npm ERR! gyp ERR! stack at ChildProcess.emit (node:events:513:28) npm ERR! gyp ERR! stack at maybeClose (node:internal/child_process:1091:16) npm ERR! gyp ERR! System Windows_NT 10.0.22621 npm ERR! gyp ERR! command "C:\\Program Files\\nodejs\\node.exe" "C:\\Users\\ASUS\\AppData\\Roaming\\npm\\node_modules\\npm\\node_modules\\node-gyp\\bin\\node-gyp.js" "configure" "--fallback-to-build" "--module=C:\\Users\\ASUS\\Documents\\Sample Project\\Audio to Text\\node_modules\\@tensorflow\\tfjs-node\\lib\\napi-v8\\tfjs_binding.node" "--module_name=tfjs_binding" "--module_path=C:\\Users\\ASUS\\Documents\\Sample Project\\Audio to Text\\node_modules\\@tensorflow\\tfjs-node\\lib\\napi-v8" "--napi_version=8" "--node_abi_napi=napi" "--napi_build_version=8" "--node_napi_label=napi-v8" npm ERR! gyp ERR! cwd C:\Users\ASUS\Documents\Sample Project\Audio to Text\node_modules\@tensorflow\tfjs-node npm ERR! gyp ERR! node -v v18.16.0 npm ERR! gyp ERR! node-gyp -v v9.4.0 npm ERR! gyp ERR! not ok npm ERR! node-pre-gyp ERR! build error npm ERR! node-pre-gyp ERR! stack Error: Failed to execute 'C:\Program Files\nodejs\node.exe C:\Users\ASUS\AppData\Roaming\npm\node_modules\npm\node_modules\node-gyp\bin\node-gyp.js configure --fallback-to-build --module=C:\Users\ASUS\Documents\Sample Project\Audio to Text\node_modules\@tensorflow\tfjs-node\lib\napi-v8\tfjs_binding.node --module_name=tfjs_binding --module_path=C:\Users\ASUS\Documents\Sample Project\Audio to Text\node_modules\@tensorflow\tfjs-node\lib\napi-v8 --napi_version=8 --node_abi_napi=napi --napi_build_version=8 --node_napi_label=napi-v8' (1) npm ERR! node-pre-gyp ERR! stack at ChildProcess. (C:\Users\ASUS\Documents\Sample Project\Audio to Text\node_modules\@mapbox\node-pre-gyp\lib\util\compile.js:89:23) npm ERR! node-pre-gyp ERR! stack at ChildProcess.emit (node:events:513:28) npm ERR! node-pre-gyp ERR! stack at maybeClose (node:internal/child_process:1091:16) npm ERR! node-pre-gyp ERR! stack at ChildProcess._handle.onexit (node:internal/child_process:302:5) npm ERR! node-pre-gyp ERR! System Windows_NT 10.0.22621 npm ERR! node-pre-gyp ERR! command "C:\\Program Files\\nodejs\\node.exe" "C:\\Users\\ASUS\\Documents\\Sample Project\\Audio to Text\\node_modules\\@mapbox\\node-pre-gyp\\bin\\node-pre-gyp" "install" "--fallback-to-build" npm ERR! node-pre-gyp ERR! cwd C:\Users\ASUS\Documents\Sample Project\Audio to Text\node_modules\@tensorflow\tfjs-node npm ERR! node-pre-gyp ERR! node -v v18.16.0 npm ERR! node-pre-gyp ERR! node-pre-gyp -v v1.0.9 npm ERR! node-pre-gyp ERR! not ok npm ERR! * Downloading libtensorflow npm ERR! npm ERR! * Building TensorFlow Node.js bindings npm ERR! A complete log of this run can be found in: C:\Users\ASUS\AppData\Local\npm-cache\_logs\2023-07-13T07_03_46_164Z-debug-0.log

create a native Node package using node-gyp

These are the bare minimum. You can also target other API levels like @nodert-win10-au, etc. You'll need to set up node-gyp with Python and Windows Build Tools and install the Windows 10 SDK corresponding to the version of the NodeRT package you pulled in.

I assume it's use of node-gyp, the native plugin system.

https://github.com/nodejs/node-gyp

I got it from here. Using -std=c++20 gives me cl : command line warning D9002: ignoring unknown option '-std=c++20'

Read the docs https://github.com/nodejs/node-gyp#on-windows