webassembly-language-runtimes VS gc

> so I wonder if there's something holding back Python + WASM

Yes. The problem is that may python libraries involve compilation of c, rust or other native languages that themselves need a WASM toolchain configured to cross compile to WASM correctly, and potentially patches to support the platform.

This toolchain support is coming though. See pyodide.org for one example.

But if you just want to grab python.wasm from somewhere and run it on the cli, take a look at something like https://github.com/vmware-labs/webassembly-language-runtimes...

WMWare labs [1] managed to compile Python/Ruby/PHP into WASM distribution. This works if you want to run the language interpreter but is limited when you want your WASM runtime (host) to run in parallel of your own program. This leads to the creation of the "reactor" concept by the community [2].

In the python WASI reactor, we load the libpython compiled for WASM and add a Rust reactor layer. Currently, it supports dynamic registration of Python lambdas and we are working on adding support for whole functions/packages.

[1] https://github.com/vmware-labs/webassembly-language-runtimes

The Python builds from the WebAssembly language runtimes [0] project target the WebAssembly System Interfaces (WASI) [1]. It allows the Python interpreter to interact with resources like the filesystem.

Many server-side Wasm runtimes supports WASI out of the box. For the browser, you need to provide a polyfill to emulate these resources like the one provided by the WASI team [2].

Regarding SQLite, these builds include libsqlite so you should be able to use it :)

- [0] https://github.com/vmware-labs/webassembly-language-runtimes

- [1] https://wasi.dev/

- [2] https://wasi.dev/polyfill/

Hello salaboy

Of course getting and gems etc gets weird in wasm..

Anyway, thanks to VMware labs for publishing interpreter wasm builds, people can play around. https://github.com/vmware-labs/webassembly-language-runtimes...

Random, but enjoy.

Hey! A WasmLabs team member here :). We're planning to port several runtimes as part of our WebAssembly Language Server initiative [1]. Porting things to Wasm+WASI is sometimes challenging. There are some deep-dives in our blog around this topic [2].

[1] https://github.com/vmware-labs/webassembly-language-runtimes...

[2] https://wasmlabs.dev/articles/php-wasm32-wasi-port/

It may take some time for WasmGC to be usable by .NET. Based on the discussions the first version of WasmGC does not have a good way to handle a few .NET specific scenarios, and said scenarios are "post-post-mvp". [0]

My concern, of course, is that there is not much incentive for those features to be added if .NET is the only platform that needs them... at that point having a form of 'include' (to where a specific GC version can just be cached and loaded by another WASM assembly) would be more useful, despite the pain it would create.

[0] - https://github.com/WebAssembly/gc/issues/77

Yes, that's definitely true: a single GC will not be optimal for everything, or even possible. Atm interior pointers are not supported at all, for example, but they are on the roadmap for later:

https://github.com/WebAssembly/gc/blob/main/proposals/gc/Pos...

What launched now is enough WasmGC to support a big and useful set of languages (Java, Kotlin, Dart, OCaml, Scheme), but a lot more work will be required here!

GC proposal is from 2018: https://github.com/WebAssembly/proposals/issues/16 and there’s code: https://github.com/WebAssembly/gc/blob/master/proposals/gc/O...

Seems like an awefully long time for progress to be made, given all the possibilities it would unlock.

First is the size. Writing a server-side and client-side program is possible with Rust, and the resulting WASM package will be small enough. At the same time, Microsoft Blazor converts C# code to WASM, but the client delivery has to include the reduced .NET runtime, taking several megabytes for a script. The same is true for GoLang, even with an attempt to reduce the runtime delivery in TinyGo WASM. Developers want to work with their favorite languages, whether it is Java, Kotlin, Dart, C#, F#, Swift, Ruby, Python, C, C++, GoLang, or Rust. These languages produce groups of runtimes. For example, JVM and .NET have many common parts, Ruby and Python are dynamically interpreted at runtime, and all mentioned depend on automatic garbage collection. For smaller WASM packages, browser vendors can include extended runtime implementations, for example, by delivering a general garbage collector as part of WASM. Garbage collection support by WASM is currently in progress: WASM GC, .NET WASM Notes.

My understanding is that the main limitation is technical. WASM doens't do GC or the host system calling conventions and cannot interact directly with object from Javascript because of this. However, this is being worked[0] on and will be solved eventually. Even without this the performance overhead of bridging to JS is low enough that WASM frameworks can beat out React.

0: https://github.com/WebAssembly/gc/blob/main/proposals/gc/Ove...

I’ve just watched a video on YouTube from Google I/O 2023 on Flutter for the web. Kevin Moore explains that Flutter can compile to Wasm, but now that GC support has been added to the standard and WasmGC is supported in Chromium and Firefox, I’m quite intrigued.

I have found the main thread about using WebAssembly GC in C#: https://github.com/WebAssembly/gc/issues/77. If I understand it correctly, it is not possible to use the current prototype version of GC in C#.

The .net team has given their notes on it, the concern is more on the memory layout from what I remember. Though it may be possible still. The runtime would likely still ship some gc code, but only a subset for cases not supported by the wasm gc itself and a few more for interfacing with the gc service, which overall should still result on smaller payloads compared to current sizes.

I assume that's one of the parts of the work done at https://github.com/WebAssembly/gc - not happening any soon yet, but it'll eventually be done.