webappsec-subresource-integrity VS pyodide

Seeing this, it reminded me of an interesting topic: caching at browser-level the external libraries used for big performance improvements: https://github.com/w3c/webappsec-subresource-integrity/issue...

All package managers implement strict specifications on this approach to integrity. For example, npm respects the W3C's "Subresource Integrity or SRI" specification, which describes the mechanisms to be implemented to reduce the risk of malicious code injection. You can jump directly here to the specification document if you want to dig deeper.

One proposed solution is checksums on CDN provided javascript:

https://w3c.github.io/webappsec-subresource-integrity/

It's great to hear that you want this added to browsers themselves, and you're right that browsers are more likely to implement such changes if you can show that users are deliberately installing an extension to add the missing functionality.

There has been some discussion at the W3C about extending the SRI spec in this direction[0], but it seems they are reluctant to do that unless "multiple browser vendors" choose to implement something like this.[1] Hopefully the existence and adoption of this browser extension helps to solve that bootstrapping / Catch-22 problem.

As for usability, would it be sufficient to just adopt a TOFU model, where the browser pins the first key it sees for a domain? To prevent the risk of permanently bricking a site (if the key gets lost, or the host gets temporarily compromised) you could politely warn the user that the key has changed, or just show a different colour icon representing that the code is correctly signed with an unknown key.

[0] https://github.com/w3c/webappsec/issues/449

[1] https://github.com/w3c/webappsec-subresource-integrity/issue...

Including the hash is exactly what subresource integrity does (even in a CDN context, conveniently enough), but so far people haven’t figured out a sufficiently non-leaky design to use it for caching[1,2].

[1] https://github.com/w3c/webappsec-subresource-integrity/issue...

[2] https://hillbrad.github.io/sri-addressable-caching/sri-addre...

We implemented an in-browser Python editor/interpreter built on Pyodide over at Comet (our users are data scientists who need to build custom visualizations quite often, and the most familiar language for most of them is Python).

One of the issues you'll run into is that Pyodide only works by default with packages that have pure Python wheels available. The team has developed support for some libraries with C dependencies (like scikit-learn, I believe), but frameworks like PyTorch are particularly thorny (see this issue: https://github.com/pyodide/pyodide/issues/1625 )

We ended up rolling out a new version of our Python visualizations that runs off-browser, in order to support enough libraries/get the performance we need: https://www.comet.com/docs/v2/guides/comet-ui/experiment-man...

Thank you! Yes, one of the items in the Roadmap is support for Pyodide (https://github.com/pyodide/pyodide) for running in-browser python on the results of each of the code blocks! This should allow most ML libs to be usable in-browser! This is pretty high-up on our priority list.

If I understand correctly, WASM only makes sense for compiled languages, you can run the python interpreter in WASM of course[1], but that will be at a significant performance disadvantage to the native javascript interpreter, and it's also something that has to be loaded every time you load the website.

[1]: https://github.com/pyodide/pyodide

If you absolutely need something comparable to Sympy, then one option might be to figure out how to best call Sympy from Rust. e.g. - RustPython, although it seems like Sympy isn't supported yet - Pyodide, and figuring out how to run it outside of a web browser. Probably also not very easy. - PyPy, and having a pretty simple Python binary for every platform - ...

For running programming languages other than JavaScript in the browser there is Emscripten and WebAssembly. There is v86, where a Linux build is compiled to WASM. Folks have written QuickJS into a Linux build compiled to WASM, Node.js into the Linux buildroot https://github.com/cemalgnlts/now, so Python or CPython can be written to the image and loaded into the browser as WASM as well https://github.com/pyodide/pyodide.

There's a Python runtime that runs on WebAssembly (https://github.com/pyodide/pyodide). I have no idea what it's like, I've never used it.

Still in a quest to provide some tooling to quickly compose documentation websites: https://github.com/synw/docdundee . As I have tons of libs to document and was tired of managing restructured language for readthedocs I started with this, and now it has executable Python examples in the frontend via a Pyodide wrapper composable: usePython

This project's brand new and a lil hacky, but I've already reached out to the scikit-learn team, and they recommended that I experiment with using Pyodide as an alternative backend for the Python bridge.