wasi-libc VS Nim

Compare wasi-libc vs Nim and see what are their differences.

wasi-libc

WASI libc implementation for WebAssembly (by WebAssembly)

Nim

Nim is a statically typed compiled systems programming language. It combines successful concepts from mature languages like Python, Ada and Modula. Its design focuses on efficiency, expressiveness, and elegance (in that order of priority). (by nim-lang)
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wasi-libc Nim
48 346
797 16,060
2.6% 0.8%
7.7 9.9
15 days ago 4 days ago
C Nim
GNU General Public License v3.0 or later 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.

wasi-libc

Posts with mentions or reviews of wasi-libc. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2023-12-09.
  • I am curious. How many of you work on a windows system?
    2 projects | /r/developersIndia | 9 Dec 2023
    Now there are projects like WASI that allows for interfacing with system resources for WASM code this allows for devs to target WASM runtime for their apps sliding the apps to run locally on any OS without any porting required. This could be a game changer in the future like Docker and containers was in the past decade.
  • How to select some elements from array randomly?
    2 projects | /r/typst | 7 Dec 2023
    So it doesn’t seem like there has been progress on a pseudo-random number generator function for typst, but there are multiple other ways to solve this: 1. Just don’t. Typst has this functional philosophy, there one input always produces the same output. (not an answer to your question tho) 2. Interface with a webassembly module which has a random number generator. So you could e.g. compile c to wasm and statically link a libc version. You would then just have to export the rand() function. (You could use any lang for this, which has a stdlib with a pseudo random number generator) 3. Implement your own. Random number generators are actually not that hard something like an LCG isn’t to complex. (Id provide an example but im on my phone rn)
  • Lapce Editor v0.3 Released
    9 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 14 Nov 2023
    Actually WASI[0] will be a better alternative, IIRC extism serialize and deserialize the data that you want to pass every time, adding a lot of overhead.

    [0] https://wasi.dev

  • Wasix, the Superset of WASI Supporting Threads, Processes and Sockets
    6 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 30 May 2023
    Actually, it was in wasi-libc: https://github.com/WebAssembly/wasi-libc/blob/main/libc-bott...
  • Valheim: Regarding Mods
    2 projects | /r/Games | 29 May 2023
    Proper isolation in C# is only now becoming a thing, with .Net support for WASI, which is essentially a WebAssembly sandbox which can be given extremely granular privileges (such as access to spefic file system directories, or an effective virtual file system). As an upside, the idea is that it should be possible to write the WASI packages in more or less anything.
  • Hardening Drupal with WebAssembly
    3 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 29 May 2023
    Wasm Labs dev here :)

    In mod_wasm, there are some differences with a pure CGI implementation. When Apache boots, it loads the configuration and initializes the WasmVM. When a new HTTP request arrives, the VM is ready so you don't need to initialize a different process to manage it.

    You still need to process the request and pass the data to the Wasm module. This step is done via STDIN through the WebAssembly System Interface (WASI) implementation [0]. The same happens in the opposite direction, as the module returns the data via STDOUT.

    So, the CGI pattern is still there, but it doesn't require new processes and all the code runs in a sandbox.

    However this is not the only way you can run a Wasm module. In this specific case, we use CGI via WASI. In other cases, you may compile a module to fulfill a specific API, like ProxyWasm [1] to create HTTP filters for proxies like Envoy.

    - [0] https://wasi.dev/

    - [1] https://github.com/proxy-wasm/spec

  • Compile emacs to wasm?
    2 projects | /r/emacs | 22 May 2023
    Never done that, but I think you need this: https://wasi.dev/
  • Extending web applications with WebAssembly and Python
    5 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 10 May 2023
    The Python builds from the WebAssembly language runtimes [0] project target the WebAssembly System Interfaces (WASI) [1]. It allows the Python interpreter to interact with resources like the filesystem.

    Many server-side Wasm runtimes supports WASI out of the box. For the browser, you need to provide a polyfill to emulate these resources like the one provided by the WASI team [2].

    Regarding SQLite, these builds include libsqlite so you should be able to use it :)

    - [0] https://github.com/vmware-labs/webassembly-language-runtimes

    - [1] https://wasi.dev/

    - [2] https://wasi.dev/polyfill/

  • How to Debug WASI Pipelines with ITK-Wasm
    6 projects | dev.to | 2 Mar 2023
    Effective debugging results in effective programming; itk-wasm makes effective debugging of WebAssembly possible. In this tutorial, adapted from the itk-wasm documentation, we walk through how to debug a C++ data processing pipeline with the mature, native binary debugging tools that are comfortable for developers. This is a fully featured way to ensure the base correctness of a processing pipeline. Next, we will walk through an interactive debugging experience for WASI WebAssembly. With itk-wasm, we can debug the same source code in either context with an interactive debugger. We also have a convenvient way to pass data from our local filesystem into a WebAssembly (Wasm) processing pipeline.
  • Running Go code inside a NodeJS app with WASM (Part 1/2, 2023)
    4 projects | dev.to | 13 Feb 2023
    Communication between the WASM module and the rest of the application needs to be done in very simple types (bytes, ints and floats). No complex types are supported yet. This is why most WASM compilers also provide some glue-code to map between complex types like strings or arrays. The Web Assembly System Interface (WAS) is an on-progress standard aimed to solve this last limitation; once it's mature it will allow easy interoperation with almost every environment. WASI is already available in some WSAM compilers and runtimes.

Nim

Posts with mentions or reviews of Nim. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2024-03-06.
  • Top Paying Programming Technologies 2024
    19 projects | dev.to | 6 Mar 2024
    22. Nim - $80,000
  • "14 Years of Go" by Rob Pike
    2 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 27 Feb 2024
    I think the right answer to your question would be NimLang[0]. In reality, if you're seeking to use this in any enterprise context, you'd most likely want to select the subset of C++ that makes sense for you or just use C#.

    [0]https://nim-lang.org/

  • Odin Programming Language
    23 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 1 Jan 2024
  • Ask HN: Interest in a Rust-Inspired Language Compiling to JavaScript?
    5 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 24 Dec 2023
    I don't think it's a rust-inspired language, but since it has strong typing and compiles to javascript, did you give a look at nim [0] ?

    For what it takes, I find the language very expressive without the verbosity in rust that reminds me java. And it is also very flexible.

    [0] : https://nim-lang.org/

  • The nim website and the downloads are insecure
    1 project | /r/nim | 11 Dec 2023
    I see a valid cert for https://nim-lang.org/
  • Nim
    5 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 6 Dec 2023
    FYI, on the front page, https://nim-lang.org, in large type you have this:

    > Nim is a statically typed compiled systems programming language. It combines successful concepts from mature languages like Python, Ada and Modula.

  • Things I've learned about building CLI tools in Python
    16 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 24 Oct 2023
    You better off with using a compiled language.

    If you interested in a language that's compiled, fast, but as easy and pleasant as Python - I'd recommend you take a look at [Nim](https://nim-lang.org).

    And to prove what Nim's capable of - here's a cool repo with 100+ cli apps someone wrote in Nim: [c-blake/bu](https://github.com/c-blake/bu)

  • Mojo is now available on Mac
    13 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 19 Oct 2023
    Chapel has at least several full-time developers at Cray/HPE and (I think) the US national labs, and has had some for almost two decades. That's much more than $100k.

    Chapel is also just one of many other projects broadly interested in developing new programming languages for "high performance" programming. Out of that large field, Chapel is not especially related to the specific ideas or design goals of Mojo. Much more related are things like Codon (https://exaloop.io), and the metaprogramming models in Terra (https://terralang.org), Nim (https://nim-lang.org), and Zig (https://ziglang.org).

    But Chapel is great! It has a lot of good ideas, especially for distributed-memory programming, which is its historical focus. It is more related to Legion (https://legion.stanford.edu, https://regent-lang.org), parallel & distributed Fortran, ZPL, etc.

  • NIR: Nim Intermediate Representation
    1 project | /r/hackernews | 2 Oct 2023
    9 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 30 Sep 2023

What are some alternatives?

When comparing wasi-libc and Nim you can also consider the following projects:

wasm-bindgen - Facilitating high-level interactions between Wasm modules and JavaScript

zig - General-purpose programming language and toolchain for maintaining robust, optimal, and reusable software.

wasi-sdk - WASI-enabled WebAssembly C/C++ toolchain

go - The Go programming language

wasmer - 🚀 The leading Wasm Runtime supporting WASIX, WASI and Emscripten

Odin - Odin Programming Language

wasmtime - A fast and secure runtime for WebAssembly

rust - Empowering everyone to build reliable and efficient software.

WASI - WebAssembly System Interface

crystal - The Crystal Programming Language

binaryen - Optimizer and compiler/toolchain library for WebAssembly

v - Simple, fast, safe, compiled language for developing maintainable software. Compiles itself in <1s with zero library dependencies. Supports automatic C => V translation. https://vlang.io