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I've experienced a 2x speedup when porting tight loops from JS to WASM. In my case, my tasks are decompression and texture decoding. I initially ported to C, and then ported to AssemblyScript, being careful to manually manage the memory along the way.
The old code was also very "tight-loop" code that just math, and no GC allocation, so it's not applicable to many people here yet, and it's possible that JS interpreters have improved since when I ported (GC behavior has gotten quite noticeably better in V8 in the last two years), but I'll take the speedups I can get.
For comparison:
Old TypeScript: https://github.com/magcius/noclip.website/blob/master/src/Wi...
New AssemblyScript: https://github.com/magcius/noclip.website/blob/master/src/as...
Wrapper for WebAssembly execution: https://github.com/magcius/noclip.website/blob/master/src/Co...
I absolutely love the new MDN where every article is just a file on Git. For example, the source for this article is here: https://github.com/mdn/content/blob/main/files/en-us/webasse...
You can find the link to the source of any article at the bottom of the page.
I'm switching a browser game side project from Typescript to WebAssembly because determinism enables a simpler style of multiplayer. Instead of relying on a server to manage state, I can just send inputs p2p like a modern fighting game (with rollback [1]). Then the game acts just like singleplayer! For a hobbyist like me, WebAssembly makes the minefield of multiplayer so much easier to navigate.
[0]: https://github.com/WebAssembly/design/blob/master/Nondetermi...
A few wasm projects I've worked on:
- An in-browser crossword puzzle generator: https://crossword.paulbutler.org/ (source: https://github.com/paulgb/crossword-composer)
- A multi-player word game: https://redwords.paulbutler.org/
- A library for synchronizing state between clients, used for that word game: https://aper.dev/ (source: https://github.com/aper-dev/aper very WIP right now)
In my experience, the single biggest perk of using WebAssembly is that I can use a language I'm very productive in (Rust) compared to JavaScript. Everything else is secondary. That said, I think these projects have specific advantages by virtue of being WebAssembly:
- The backtracking search used for the crossword puzzle generator is carefully implemented to not allocate extra memory. This would be tough to do in JavaScript, and I believe it's partly responsible for its performance.
- The word game uses a compression algorithm that benefits very noticeably from wasm-opt, to the point that I can't run it without it. Given that wasm-opt takes a non-trivial amount of time at compile time, I suspect the JavaScript JIT would be slow at doing something similar at runtime. This is just conjecture, I haven't checked.
- What Aper does just wouldn't be possible without Rust features like Serde and macros.
Static site generators have been around for ages. Jekyll was one of the first, as far as I know, but there are dozens of others now.
https://jekyllrb.com/
https://jamstack.org/
Here's one: https://amp.dev/documentation/examples/components/amp-analyt..., backed by https://github.com/ampproject/amp.dev/blob/future/examples/s...
Do you have an example of getting bazel to work with emscripten?
I’ll share mine if you share yours:
https://github.com/sorbet/sorbet/tree/master/tools/toolchain...
When we set this up to compile Sorbet (C++ codebase) for https://sorbet.run, it involved what I considered an inordinate amount of boilerplate and arcana.
To be fair since we set it up it’s hardly ever needed to be touched, and I could probably cargo cult this into future projects where I wanted to use it, but I wouldn’t exactly say that bazel magically makes the pain of emscripten go away.
Curious to hear otherwise.
The trick is that to provide Bazel with a custom toolchain involves way more than just setting an environment variable, because Bazel wants to control installing and making available the compiler reliably (e.g., what if `emcc` is not present on the system where Bazel was invoked? Bazel solves that problem by fetching it and building it for that system)
There are projects that provide drop-in support for custom toolchains (e.g., we use this project[0] in Sorbet to fetch and build a custom LLVM/Clang toolchain for every host we build on (rather than relying on the system toolchain). But I'm not aware of a project that has done that for Emscripten. Maybe it would be as easy as plucking out what we've done in our project into a project that others could depend on, but to quote a colleague:
> Setting up a cc toolchain in Bazel is a unique sort of pain.
[0] https://github.com/grailbio/bazel-toolchain/
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