web2js VS dvi2html

When I last looked, it seemed like WASM blobs just take arrays of numbers and return arrays of numbers. No objects, strings, or DOM elements, so I think it'd be tough to do web dev in wasm as it stands. And you need javascript glue if you want anything in the way of side effects.

There is, however, quite a bit you can do in it. TeX has been compiled to wasm[1], it's about 600kb uncompressed 90k compressed (the memory image with latex loaded is about 6MB compressed though - latex is a beast). I think anything computationally intensive would be a good candidate for wasm (it has int64).

1: https://github.com/kisonecat/web2js

I implemented a TeX engine in WebAssembly so you really can run TeX in the browser. You can see a demo of this at https://tex.rossprogram.org/ and at https://github.com/kisonecat/web2js you can find a Pascal compiler that targets WebAssembly which can compile Knuth's TeX. Interesting primitives like \directjs are also implemented, so you can execute javascript from inside TeX. The rendering is handled with https://github.com/kisonecat/dvi2html for which I finally fixed some font problems.

To make it relatively fast, the TeX engine gets snapshotted and shipped to the browser with much of TeXlive already loaded. So even things like TikZ work reasonably well. There is of course a lot more to do! The plan is to convert ximera.osu.edu to this new backend by the fall.

I implemented a TeX engine in WebAssembly so you really can run TeX in the browser. You can see a demo of this at https://tex.rossprogram.org/ and at https://github.com/kisonecat/web2js you can find a Pascal compiler that targets WebAssembly which can compile Knuth's TeX. Interesting primitives like \directjs are also implemented, so you can execute javascript from inside TeX. The rendering is handled with https://github.com/kisonecat/dvi2html for which I finally fixed some font problems.

To make it relatively fast, the TeX engine gets snapshotted and shipped to the browser with much of TeXlive already loaded. So even things like TikZ work reasonably well. There is of course a lot more to do! The plan is to convert ximera.osu.edu to this new backend by the fall.