web2js VS qubyte-codes

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.

https://qubyte.codes

I blog about things which interest me (mostly JS and creative code related), but also take Japanese language notes as I learn. Also part of the 250KB club!

It's built with my own hand-rolled static site generator, and I'm pretty proud of it's capabilities now. I've got a bunch of indieweb features integrated into it. I have no sense of style though!

Source: https://github.com/qubyte/qubyte-codes

I use server rendered SVG with mathjax as part of my static site generator. To try to make it as accessible as possible I add a title element with an ID to each SVG and use an aria-labelledby attribute to connect the two [1] (a sample for the interested, scroll about half way down [2]). The title content is the unrendered LaTeX source.

I'm very interested in the notion of using HTML and CSS rendering though! Many thanks to the author for pointing out this functionality.

[1]: https://github.com/qubyte/qubyte-codes/blob/main/lib/render....

Another static site builder author here. I found some of the same awkwardness in recreating __dirname, but after some massaging found it only remains when path.join is also used (which can't work with a file URL and can't be simply replaced with URL construction because the existing path is lost). I went the whole hog and completely replaced all CJS in my own code, and it's working well. Luckily I avoided issues with third party modules breaking.

PR with the changes: https://github.com/qubyte/qubyte-codes/pull/323