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Py2wasm – A Python to WASM Compiler
11–20 of 175 posts
Re: Py2wasm – A Python to WASM Compiler
#12> py2wasm converts your Python programs to WebAssembly, running them at 3x faster speeds This is clearly written in the article, but I hope that the impatient readers will understand that this is 3 times faster than the CPython wasm, not the native CPython.
Yeah more honest would have been "2x slower"!
Even more honest would be “on one particular microbenchmark that everybody optimizes for”.
That said, this seems like a really cool project that could have some real value! It still fully depends on having the full CPython runtime environment, but that means it could work correctly with most existing code and libraries (including numpy and script).
Re: Py2wasm – A Python to WASM Compiler
#13Nice. Maybe a pie in the sky but considering how prevalent python is in machine learning, how likely is it that at some point most ML frameworks written in python become executable on a web browser through WASM?
Depending on the underling machine learning activity (GPU/no-GPU) it should be already possible today. Any low level machine learning loops are raw native code or GPU already and Python’s execution speed is irrelevant here. The question is do the web browsers and WebAssembly have enough RAM to do any meaningful machine learning work.
WebGL, WebGPU, WebNN
Which have better process isolation; containers or Chrome's app sandbox at pwn2own how do I know what is running in a WASM browser tab?
JupyterLite, datasette-lite, and the Pyodide plugin for vscode.dev ship with Pyodide's WASM compilation of CPython and SciPy Stack / PyData tools.
`%pip install -q mendeley` in a notebook opened with the Pyodide Jupyter kernel works by calling `await micropip.install(["mendeley"])` IIRC.
picomamba installs conda packages from emscripten-forge, which is like conda-forge: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33892076#33916270 :
> FWIU Service Workers and Task Workers and Web Locks are the browser APIs available for concurrency in browsers
sqlite-wasm, sqlite-wasm-http, duckdb-wasm, (edit) postgresql WASM / pglite ; WhatTheDuck, pretzelai ; lancedb/lance is faster than pandas with dtype_backend="arrow" and has a vector index
"SQLite Wasm in the browser backed by the Origin Private File System" (2023) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34352935#34366429
"WebGPU is now available on Android" (2024) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39046787
"WebNN: Web Neural Network API" https://www.w3.org/TR/webnn/ : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36159049
"The best WebAssembly runtime may be no runtime" (2024) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38609105
(Edit) emscripten-forge packages are built for the wasm32-unknown-emscripten build target, but wasm32-wasi is what is now supported by cpython (and pypi?) https://www.google.com/search?q=wasm32-wasi+conda-forge
Re: Py2wasm – A Python to WASM Compiler
#14Nice. Maybe a pie in the sky but considering how prevalent python is in machine learning, how likely is it that at some point most ML frameworks written in python become executable on a web browser through WASM?
Python in ML acts as a glue language for loading the data, the interface, api, et. The hard work is done by C libraries running in parallel on GPUs.
Python is quite slow, and handles parallelization very badly. This is not very important for data loading and conditioning tasks, which would benefit little from parallelization, but it is critical for inference.
Re: Py2wasm – A Python to WASM Compiler
#15Nice--it's great to see more options for interoperability between Python and WASM. I was aware of Pyodide [1], but Py2wasm seems to be a tool for compiling specific scripts into WASM rather than having an entire Python distribution in the browser. Please correct me if I'm misunderstanding the difference between the two however. [1]: https://pyodide.org/en/stable/
That's my understanding as well. And Pyodide being a great piece of engineering, is still lagging behind compiled Wasm languages in terms of footprint at least and performance sometimes, unfortunately.
Re: Py2wasm – A Python to WASM Compiler
#16So I had a look at the repo/branches at https://github.com/wasmerio/py2wasm. This might be a nit, but in the spirit of OSS: if I'd done this work, I'd have contributed it to upstream Nuitka. I definitely would not have forked a whole new GitHub repo and given it a completely different name.
What's the rationale for creating a new project and calling it py2wasm? Am I missing something?
Re: Py2wasm – A Python to WASM Compiler
#17Nice. Maybe a pie in the sky but considering how prevalent python is in machine learning, how likely is it that at some point most ML frameworks written in python become executable on a web browser through WASM?
Last we checked for one of our use cases around sandboxing, key pydata libraries were slowly moving there, but it takes a village.
At that time, I think our blockers were Apache Arrow, Parquet readers, and startup time. There were active issues on all three. The GPU & multicore thing is a different story.as that is more about Google & Apple than WASM wrt browsers, and I'd be curious about the CUDA story serverside. We didn't research the equivalent of volume mounts and shmem for fast read-only data imports.
For Louie.AI, we ended up continuing with serverside & container-based sandboxing (containers w libseccomp, nsjail, disabled networking, ...).
Hard to motivate wasm in the server for general pydata sandboxing in 2024 given startup times, slowdowns, devices, etc: most of our users who want the extra protection would also rather just self-host, decreasing the threat model. Maybe look again in 2025? It's still a good direction, just not there yet.
As a browser option, or using with some more limited cloud FaaS use cases, still potentially interesting for us, and we will keep tracking.
Re: Py2wasm – A Python to WASM Compiler
#18So I had a look at the repo/branches at https://github.com/wasmerio/py2wasm . This might be a nit, but in the spirit of OSS: if I'd done this work, I'd have contributed it to upstream Nuitka. I definitely would not have forked a whole new GitHub repo and given it a completely different name. What's the rationale for creating a new project and calling it py2wasm? Am I missing something?
My first thought upon reading Nuitka's name in the article was along the lines of "I hope they've contributed some of this to Nuitka". Not a very nice trend.
Re: Py2wasm – A Python to WASM Compiler
#19It may be a stupid question, but is there already some DOM access or a dedicated package that allows writing web applications in this compiled python?
Re: Py2wasm – A Python to WASM Compiler
#20Nice. Maybe a pie in the sky but considering how prevalent python is in machine learning, how likely is it that at some point most ML frameworks written in python become executable on a web browser through WASM?
Last we checked for one of our use cases around sandboxing, key pydata libraries were slowly moving there, but it takes a village. At that time, I think our blockers were Apache Arrow, Parquet readers, and startup time. There were active issues on all three. The GPU & multicore thing is a different story.as that is more about Google & Apple than WASM wrt browsers, and I'd be curious about the CUDA story serverside. W…
Pyarrow is giving a headache trying to get it compiled with Emscripten