Gc Alternatives

gc reviews and mentions

• Bring garbage collected programming languages efficiently to WebAssembly
  16 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 3 Nov 2023

  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

  16 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 3 Nov 2023

  The WASM GC support is intentionally kept as simple as possible, see https://github.com/WebAssembly/gc/blob/main/proposals/gc/MVP... . Building a "universal" or "generic" VM supporting many languages on an equally seamless basis is explicitly not a goal of WASM-GC; it is expected that each implementation might require its own hacks on top of the basic support WASM provides, but this is okay because FFI/cross-language interop is seen as an entirely separate issue.

• WasmGC – Compile and run GC languages such as Kotlin, Java in Chrome browser
  4 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 2 Nov 2023

  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!

• Learn WebAssembly by writing small programs
  7 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 5 Sep 2023

  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.

• The state of modern Web development and perspectives on improvements
  5 projects | dev.to | 24 Aug 2023

  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.

• Douglas Crockford: “We should stop using JavaScript”
  6 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 12 Jun 2023

  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...

• Blazor United - When it ships it would be the most glorious way to do web with .NET
  5 projects | /r/programming | 25 Jan 2023

  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.

• Kernel-WASM: Sandboxed kernel mode WebAssembly runtime for Linux
  4 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 20 Jan 2023

  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.

• Out of the loop: WASM for non-web projects
  8 projects | /r/rust | 1 Jan 2023

  To be fair, there is a GC proposal and some runtimes might even already be working on it, but as of today we have no WASM runtime that handles garbage collection.

• WebAssembly: Docker Without Containers
  9 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 21 Dec 2022

  Actually, Wasm goes into the direction you are pointing. A Wasm runtime should add a little overhead to the requirements of the Wasm module.

  However, it's true Wasm is not on that point yet. There are open threads about deallocate Wasm memory [1]. However, I expect these features, as well as Garbage Collection [2] will come to the stardard over time. This will allow modules and runtimes to properly manage memory usage.

  [1] https://stackoverflow.com/a/51544868

  [2] https://github.com/WebAssembly/gc

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