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Learn WebAssembly by writing small programs

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Re: Learn WebAssembly by writing small programs

#51

Post by zdragnar »

ozcanay wrote: post #49

Cool. Did anyone try targeting Qt applications for WebAssembly? I wonder how convenient it is to use.

There's an interesting write up here: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/qt-wasm-nicholas-petreley-1c

Personally, I didn't find the author's sample app to load very quickly- I think it was 10 seconds or so just to get something on the screen- and it was useless on my phone.

That same app would easily perform better and have better device support were it written in js/html/css.

I just don't see a place for things like QT or native gui stuff in real world WASM. Number crunching or fast data processing, sure, or maybe a game, but a standard UI is crap if the whole thing is in a big canvas.

Re: Learn WebAssembly by writing small programs

#52

Post by emnudge »

ysavir wrote: post #45

Looks very similar to the Exercism model, which also has a free WASM course filled with small exercises[1]. I wonder if the author considered contributing to that course or working together with them, it might get their work to a broader audience and leverage the existing toolset Exercism has to offer. [1] https://exercism.org/tracks/wasm

I really like Exercism! Unfortunately their exercise model is considerably more free-form where it teaches you considerably less and in much larger chunks. I think this is a great model for certain contexts, but the format I have in the repo is more similar to "rustlings" and "ziglings" where you're taught syntax and features alongside the code examples.

I don't know that their Wasm module is necessarily "broken", so I'm unsure whether my contributions would be welcome.

Re: Learn WebAssembly by writing small programs

#53

Post by math_dandy »

Philip-J-Fry wrote: post #44
math_dandy wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is being a "JS killer" even a goal of WASM? From what I understand, WASM's goal is to allow computationally heavy workloads (e.g., image and audio processing) to the browser by providing a compilation target for C code. This is how we get nice things like Figma or MS Office running in the browser. Let WASM do the number crunching, let JS do the UI.

It's not the goal from what it seems. But it's definitely what would make it the most interesting to a lot of people, and it's what I think most people expected at some point. For a lot of companies the only place JavaScript is ever used is on their website frontend. And it makes you wonder, why does it even still need to be JavaScript? With the rise of SPAs and the fall of normal document based websites, browsers ar…

The two language problem is, indeed, awkward.

DOM bindings in WASM would be awesome. I would be a happy nerd if I could do all of my web dev in OCaml.

In the meantime, WASM has real, just not for front end dev.

The two language problem is hardly unique to web dev. It’s also ubiquitous in the machine learning/data science space with Python and C/C++/CUDA playing the roles of JS and WASM, respectively.

Re: Learn WebAssembly by writing small programs

#54

Post by ysavir »

emnudge wrote: post #52
ysavir wrote: post #45

Looks very similar to the Exercism model, which also has a free WASM course filled with small exercises[1]. I wonder if the author considered contributing to that course or working together with them, it might get their work to a broader audience and leverage the existing toolset Exercism has to offer. [1] https://exercism.org/tracks/wasm

I really like Exercism! Unfortunately their exercise model is considerably more free-form where it teaches you considerably less and in much larger chunks. I think this is a great model for certain contexts, but the format I have in the repo is more similar to "rustlings" and "ziglings" where you're taught syntax and features alongside the code examples. I don't know that their Wasm module is necessarily "broken", so…

Very fair! It's been close to a decade since I used Exercism so I don't really know what their stuff is like nowadays. From what I remember, the focus was less on teaching you the language directly (via instructions) and was more on encouraging the user to reiterate on their code and experiment, and letting reviewers lead the direction of growth.

Re: Learn WebAssembly by writing small programs

#55

Post by progmetaldev »

ReleaseCandidat wrote: post #14
danielvaughn wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been watching WASM from afar, and it's my understanding that it's not a JS killer because it doesn't have direct access to the DOM or to most DOM APIs. I'm curious if there's another reason I'm missing?

It doesn't have access to _anything_ (in the browser, in other runtimes there is WASI with POSIX functions). Everything has to be imported from or exported to JS. And currently using anything but C, C++ or Rust isn't feasible, as the runtime needed for a GC is way too big. A Haskell "Hello World" for example is about 1MB (even after running `wasm-opt` on the generated WASM binary).

I do agree things like the GC are very large if we're comparing against standard JavaScript, so I don't believe the technology is ready for standard customer facing websites. For things like internal applications/extranet type applications, I think that the runtime download cost is minimal compared to the functionality that you are given with a proper framework (I can only speak of Microsoft Blazor, but that's just language ignorance, and I know there are other that fit the model as well). As a web developer that also writes utilities to run on the desktop, for things such as ETL or fixing bad data, being able to not switch to another language or even really framework is a huge boon for my time. I know JavaScript, but being able to rarely have to deal with it keeps my head in what I'm solving, rather than having to context switch between interface and server.

Re: Learn WebAssembly by writing small programs

#56

Post by tyingq »

dragonwriter wrote: post #38
ReleaseCandidat wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't have access to _anything_ (in the browser, in other runtimes there is WASI with POSIX functions). Everything has to be imported from or exported to JS. And currently using anything but C, C++ or Rust isn't feasible, as the runtime needed for a GC is way too big. A Haskell "Hello World" for example is about 1MB (even after running `wasm-opt` on the generated WASM binary).

> And currently using anything but C, C++ or Rust isn't feasible Someone should tell Anaconda that they can't do this, then: https://pyscript.net/

That uses Pyodide. From Pyodide's own pages:

"At present a first load of Pyodide requires a 6.4 MB download, and the environment initialization takes 4 to 5 seconds."

So, yes, it works. But there's plenty of situations where a big download followed by a 5 second stall is a non-starter.

Re: Learn WebAssembly by writing small programs

#57

Post by catlover76 »

math_dandy wrote: post #53
Philip-J-Fry wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not the goal from what it seems. But it's definitely what would make it the most interesting to a lot of people, and it's what I think most people expected at some point. For a lot of companies the only place JavaScript is ever used is on their website frontend. And it makes you wonder, why does it even still need to be JavaScript? With the rise of SPAs and the fall of normal document based websites, browsers ar…

The two language problem is, indeed, awkward. DOM bindings in WASM would be awesome. I would be a happy nerd if I could do all of my web dev in OCaml. In the meantime, WASM has real, just not for front end dev. The two language problem is hardly unique to web dev. It’s also ubiquitous in the machine learning/data science space with Python and C/C++/CUDA playing the roles of JS and WASM, respectively.

> I would be a happy nerd if I could do all of my web dev in OCaml.

You don't like Bonsai? Or do you just want something that doesn't "transpile" to JS at all?

Re: Learn WebAssembly by writing small programs

#59

Post by RagnarD »

I'm cheered by ongoing progress in adoption of WebAssembly. While Microsoft is often given minimal notice here, I urge anyone interested in WASM to experiment with Blazor WebAssembly. It's an incredibly powerful framework that lets you use C# and most .NET libraries (including NuGet packages) as compiled WASM in the browser.

Re: Learn WebAssembly by writing small programs

#60

Post by hsbauauvhabzb »

RagnarD wrote: post #59

I'm cheered by ongoing progress in adoption of WebAssembly. While Microsoft is often given minimal notice here, I urge anyone interested in WASM to experiment with Blazor WebAssembly. It's an incredibly powerful framework that lets you use C# and most .NET libraries (including NuGet packages) as compiled WASM in the browser.

Re ‘most nuget packages’ What’s the limitation here? If it requires the ability to read a file on disk, does it straight up fail or does the file read interface push the action back into a server-side rendering type action?
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