webr VS jupytext

A little context: this dive into Fortran is part of the excellent work George has been doing on WebR, to get R running in the browser. The R sources contain a fair bit of Fortran code, and I believe WebR originally used f2c to compile the Fortran to C first, before compiling that to wasm.

With the patches to LLVM Flang, WebR can be built with a real Fortran compiler.

I think George didn't want to say it directly in the blog post, but he has said that he's hoping that Flang would take his patches or implement better ones. That would be a win-win -- these patches wouldn't need to be maintained separately, and since unmodified Flang would be able to compile to wasm, it would benefit other projects out there that use Fortran.

https://docs.r-wasm.org/webr/latest/

I don't think it's close to useful - but the R in webassembly webR, that runs in the browser looks interesting.

Jupytext (https://github.com/mwouts/jupytext) has been designed exactly for this

jupytext is your friend.

So if you run your own jupyter server, -jupy+text can be a great workflow : it takes your notebook synchronized with other formats (python file, makdown, ...), so you can edit your py/md file with neovim, and refresh the browser to execute the notebook.

Automatically convert ipynb files to py when saving them on JupyterLab

I don't use Jupyter so I don't know for sure, but on a quick glance you might want to look at https://github.com/mwouts/jupytext to see if that could help at all.

The format is only partially invented, it follows Jupytext [0], but adds support for cell metadata. There is no obvious way to get that in fenced codeblocks, especially with the ability to spread it over multiple lines so it plays well with version control.

One more consideration is that it's not "Markdown with code blocks interspersed", one might as well use plaintext or AsciiDoc.

Of course there are tradeoffs.. I wish I had more time to work on it.

[0]: https://github.com/gzuidhof/starboard-notebook/blob/master/d...

[1]: https://github.com/mwouts/jupytext

Using jupytext (allows you to open .md files as notebooks) + jupyter gives you pretty much the same experience. The main issue is that the cell's output will be discarded. To fix it, you can use ploomber to generate an output HTML, so the workflow goes like this:

First, the format. The ipynb format does not play nicely with git since it stores the cell's source code and output in the same file. But Jupyter has built-in mechanisms to allow other formats to look like notebooks. For example, here's a library that allows you to store notebooks on a postgres database (I know this isn't practical, but it's a great example). To give more practical advice, jupytext allows you to open .py files as notebooks. So you can develop interactively but in the backend, you're storing .py files.