wapm-cli VS wasmer-js

To actually compile this we can use a tool called WABT (WebAssembly Binary Toolkit). It's basically a mess that requires CMake and I couldn't get it to run on WSL and I wasn't going to install MinGW. Instead there's a nice tool called WAPM from Wasmer which works like npm for webassembly packages and since it's been compiled down to webassembly we can run it in any environment. In fact we don't even need to add configuration so long as wapm is installed. We can run wax wat2wasm -- wat/mat.wat -o wasm/mat.wasm. wax is like npx for npm. If you're wondering the command we give wax is defined by the wasmer/wabt package: https://wapm.io/wasmer/wabt. Also for some reason you can't prefix local paths with ./ so wax wat2wasm -- ./wat/mat.wat doesn't work which tool me a while to figure out. Anyway this provides a nice simple compile environment if you want to work on raw WAT files.

That's the main reason we should start using WebAssembly for distributing and using packages.

Shamless plug: Wasmer [1] and WAPM [2] could help a lot on this quest!

[1]: https://wasmer.io/

[2]: https://wapm.io/

There's WAPM

If it's buildable for the WebAssembly WASI target, consider also distributing it through WAPM.

I don't know if many people have heard of it, but there's actually a WebAssembly Package Manager. It's similar to crates.io, except you upload WebAssembly binaries written in any language instead of Rust source code!

You can see this paying off with wapm, which lets you download applications that would have normally required compilation for your environment and run them anywhere with a supported runtime, which is imo pretty neat.

One step closer to the day when I can put actix-web creations up on WAPM so "Just type wax my-cool-thing to try it out" can be one of the distribution options.

I've added limited support to run wapm.io directly from the Terminal. Examples of commands that work well are wapm cowsay {Text} and wapm uuid.

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I was then able to just use this code example with one caveat (https://github.com/wasmerio/wasmer-js?tab=readme-ov-file#use...)

I had to update the SDK import with crossorigin="anonymous"

I use https://github.com/wasmerio/wasmer-js and while v0.12 works fine, v1.2 never returns and is stuck in a busy loop internally somewhere. I did not bother bisecting it because the API changed at v1.0.

You can run WASI/WASM modules in the browser using e.g. the (rather simplistic) official WASI polyfill or the more fully-featured wasmer/wasi. So while htis is certainly a bit more combersome than a direct JS FFI, you should already be able to interact with WASI/WASM-compiled Haskell code from JS.

Good spotto! That's the WASI runtime from wasmerjs (https://github.com/wasmerio/wasmer-js).

That's not the WASI runtime being used in this playground. The one in this playground is @runno/wasi-motor (https://github.com/taybenlor/runno/tree/main/packages/wasi-m...). I haven't released it as an NPM package, but it's all MIT so feel free to copy it.

WASI Modules via Wasmer JS

I have good news! Wasmer can also be run on the browser. Check out wasmer-js [1]

[1] https://github.com/wasmerio/wasmer-js/

Maybe wasmer-js could be used by Deno to provide WASI support inside their engine? :-)