wasm-pack VS prql

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.

After four years, I found some time to pay that deb-tech (yes, quite a long time, eh). To make it fun I rewrote everything from scratch in SolidJS, which went smooth thanks to this amazing library p5js-wrapper. For WASM, C++ is still a good choice, but what about Rust? I did some research and found wasm-pack. A few lines in the cargo.toml file and we were ready to generate compiled + ready to import bytecode!

Support using wasm-pack in Worklets (particularly AudioWorklet) #689

If you're looking to use it to interface with node/browsers, then try wasm-pack.

Webassembly: wasm-bindgen 0.2.83 / wasm-pack 0.10.3

wasm-pack has bugs - it publishes a module which declares itself as a commonjs module. (You can fix that by manually adding "type": "module" in package.json). Then the web build should work with other bundlers. I opened an issue about this over a year ago. There's a PR and everything, but no movement :/

wasm-pack helps you build Rust-generated WebAssembly packages and use it in the browser or with Node.js.

Is the Rust WASM ecosystem being half dead better? wasm-pack and wasm-bindgen are barely maintained anymore, and trust me it's not because everything works flawlessly…

I've been learning Rust for the past few weeks and have been enjoying it a lot.

- The community is very helpful on Discord (https://discord.com/invite/rust-lang-community).

- The package ecosystem (crates.io) makes it very easy to find and import things, and they're consistently documented.

- There's a path to compiling on web via WebAssembly (https://rustwasm.github.io/wasm-pack/)

In a few weeks of learning the language, I managed to put together this visualization: https://twitter.com/admiralakk/status/1542560489091350529

But realistically, either Go or Rust will be fine. You should pick the one you're more likely to stick with and learn, even when it gets tough. I've found the community aspect to be very helpful, because then at least I know I'm not the only idiot out there.

There are various ways to set up a web project that uses Svelte, Wasm, and Rust. For example, wasm-pack from the rust-wasm group provides a template for simple HTML-CSS-JS applications. There are also several project templates for React or Svelte with Rust and Wasm.

> I completely attribute this to SQL being difficult or "backwards" to parse. I mean backwards in the way that in SQL you start with what you want first (the SELECT) rather than what you have and widdling it down.

> The turning point for me was to just accept SQL for what it is.

Or just write PRQL and compile it to SQL

https://github.com/PRQL/prql

Hey HN! We’ve built Pretzel, an open-source data exploration and visualization tool that runs fully in the browser and can handle large files (200 MB CSV on my 8gb MacBook air is snappy). It’s also reactive - so if, for example, you change a filter, all the data transform blocks after it re-evaluate automatically. You can try it here: https://pretzelai.github.io/ (static hosted webpage) or see a demo video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=73wNEun_L7w

You can play with the demo CSV that’s pre-loaded (GitHub data of text-editor adjacent projects) or upload your own CSV/XLSX file. The tool runs fully in-browser—you can disconnect from the internet once the website loads—so feel free to use sensitive data if you like.

Here’s how it works: You upload a CSV file and then, explore your data as a series of successive data transforms and plots. For example, you might: (1) Remove some columns; (2) Apply some filters (remove nulls, remove outliers, restrict time range etc); (3) Do a pivot (i.e, a group-by but fancier); (4) Plot a chart; (5) Download the chart and the the transformed data. See screenshot: https://imgur.com/a/qO4yURI

In the UI, each transform step appears as a “Block”. You can always see the result of the full transform in a table on the right. The transform blocks are editable - for instance in the example above, you can go to step 2, change some filters and the reactivity will take care of re-computing all the cells that follow, including the charts.

We wanted Pretzel to run locally in the browser and be extremely performant on large files. So, we parse CSVs with the fastest CSV parser (uDSV: https://github.com/leeoniya/uDSV) and use DuckDB-Wasm (https://github.com/duckdb/duckdb-wasm) to do all the heavy lifting of processing the data. We also wanted to allow for chained data transformations where each new block operates on the result of the previous block. For this, we’re using PRQL (https://prql-lang.org/) since it maps 1-1 with chained data transform blocks - each block maps to a chunk of PRQL which when combined, describes the full data transform chain. (PRQL doesn’t support DuckDB’s Pivot statement though so we had to make some CTE based hacks).

There’s also an AI block: This is the only (optional) feature that requires an internet connection but we’re working on adding local model support via Ollama. For now, you can use your own OpenAI API key or use an AI server we provide (GPT4 proxy; it’s loaded with a few credits), specify a transform in plain english and get back the SQL for the transform which you can edit.

Our roadmap includes allowing API calls to create new columns; support for an SQL block with nice autocomplete features, and a Python block (using Pyodide to run Python in the browser) on the results of the data transforms, much like a jupyter notebook.

There’s two of us and we’ve only spent about a week coding this and fixing major bugs so there are still some bugs to iron out. We’d love for you to try this and to get your feedback!

> Looks like PRQL doesn't have a Go library so I guess they just really wanted something in Go?

There's some C bindings and the example in the README shows integration with Go:

https://github.com/PRQL/prql/tree/main/prqlc/bindings/prqlc-...

Can someone tell me why PRQL is better? I went here: https://github.com/PRQL/prql

It looks nice, but what's the strengths compared to SQL?

PRQL [1] is a compile-to-SQL relational querying language that puts FROM first.

[1] https://prql-lang.org

https://prql-lang.org/ might be an answer for this. As a cross-database pipelined language, it would allow RAG to be intermixed with the query, and the syntax may(?) be more reliable to generate