watt VS nanoserde

The precompiled binary is not a sandboxed WASM binary. Despite the name "watt" it has nothing to do with https://github.com/dtolnay/watt . You can look at the actual code to see for yourself.

* Related: watt is one approach to pre-compile proc-macro crates using WASM.

In addition to thiserror and anyhow, our resident superhuman Rust-improving Robot, dtolnay, also developed an experiment in distributing precompiled proc macros as WebAssembly named Watt and, though I never bothered to create a Zulip account so I don't know what was said, I'm told there has been discussion around the idea of implementing something in that vein.

I think when we have Cranelift, Mold, and maybe Watt all working together then compile times will basically be a non-issue. It'll be a few years though.

Check out https://github.com/dtolnay/watt - it's a really interesting solution to the problem!

I really like the idea of Watt: https://github.com/dtolnay/watt Run macros in a wasm sandbox so they can't touch anything you don't explicitly allow.

I really wish there was more interest in getting something like Watt upstreamed.

what do you think of the parser in nanoserde? https://github.com/not-fl3/nanoserde/blob/master/derive/src/parse.rs

Yeah proc macros have a massive hole in their user experience. Nobody actually wants to use them without syn + quote functionality, so the majority of people just pay the compile time cost of syn/quote/procmacro2. But then a subset of people can't afford to pay the compile time cost, so they either: 1. Don't use them. And remove all of their deps that use them ... which is generally a lot. 2. Hand-manage the TokenStream (which is very much not fun). Macroquad doesn't want syn + quote in their tree because they care _deeply about compile times, so they opted to re-implement serde. Serde is the crowned jewel of the rust ecosystem. Someone feeling unable to use it is a massive failure of the system.