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Moving from TypeScript to Rust / WebAssembly

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Re: Moving from TypeScript to Rust / WebAssembly

#61

Post by pjmlp »

chjj wrote: post #46

> webassembly is faster than javascript Everyone says this, but I would dispute it as misleading in a lot of cases. I've been experimenting a lot with wasm lately. Yes, it is faster than javascript, but not by all that much. It's the speed of generic 32 bit C. It leaves a lot to be desired in the way of performance. My crypto library, when compiled to web assembly, is maybe 2-3x the speed of the equivalent javascript…

Chrome already has experimental support for SIMD, have you tried that as well?

Otherwise, eventually I expect WebAssembly to match what Flash Crossfire and PNaCL were capable of 10 years ago.

Re: Moving from TypeScript to Rust / WebAssembly

#62

Post by harikb »

apatheticonion wrote: post #51
harikb wrote: post #31

Alon Zakai[1] gave a good talk[2] on the current state of WebAssembly, particularly on the current state of performance 1. https://twitter.com/kripken 2. https://youtu.be/4ZMY3QE5t9o

I'm not certain exactly how LLVM works so I am not sure this is the right question to ask but - How does Web Assembly relate/compare to LLVM? Does LLVM solve the problem of a single binary that can be run portably?

There are not comparable afaik. WASM is also more ambitious, along with WASI (system interface) creating a portable final executable (compare to JVM), whereas LLVM is only a set of intermediate language and tools.

When this transition period goes away, LLVM should hopefully compile to WASM binary as a target. The current path described in the video of WASM -> C -> clang -> llvm -> native-binary is a temporary workaround afaik.

Re: Moving from TypeScript to Rust / WebAssembly

#63

Post by chjj »

ben-schaaf wrote: post #55
chjj wrote: post #46

> webassembly is faster than javascript Everyone says this, but I would dispute it as misleading in a lot of cases. I've been experimenting a lot with wasm lately. Yes, it is faster than javascript, but not by all that much. It's the speed of generic 32 bit C. It leaves a lot to be desired in the way of performance. My crypto library, when compiled to web assembly, is maybe 2-3x the speed of the equivalent javascript…

Have you tried with firefox? Last I heard they've got far and away the fastest wasm implementation.

No. I've just been building with the WASI SDK and running the resulting binary with a small node.js wrapper script. So, I've only tested v8's WASM implementation so far.

Does firefox have a headless mode, a standalone implementation, or some CLI tool I can use to run a WASM binary? Running stuff in the browser is cumbersome.

Re: Moving from TypeScript to Rust / WebAssembly

#64

Post by fulafel »

iMuzz wrote: post #5
phailhaus wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depends on what you're optimizing for. If you want memory efficiency and near-native speeds, then you need WebAssembly. And Rust is a fantastic source language to compile to WebAssembly because of its memory safety.

Mind explaining a bit more here why Rust is a particularly good language to compile to wasm? Why does memory safety help here? Asking out of ignorance!

Wasm is not memory safe inside the sandbox, so the language should enforce it if you care about correctness and/or dislike the C/C++ memory bugs and debugging.

Re: Moving from TypeScript to Rust / WebAssembly

#65

Post by chjj »

pjmlp wrote: post #61
chjj wrote: post #46

> webassembly is faster than javascript Everyone says this, but I would dispute it as misleading in a lot of cases. I've been experimenting a lot with wasm lately. Yes, it is faster than javascript, but not by all that much. It's the speed of generic 32 bit C. It leaves a lot to be desired in the way of performance. My crypto library, when compiled to web assembly, is maybe 2-3x the speed of the equivalent javascript…

Chrome already has experimental support for SIMD, have you tried that as well? Otherwise, eventually I expect WebAssembly to match what Flash Crossfire and PNaCL were capable of 10 years ago.

No, but I've been meaning to test this. I did notice it was available in node.js with --experimental-wasm-simd. I hope this proves me wrong about wasm, but I'll have to try it.

Re: Moving from TypeScript to Rust / WebAssembly

#66

Post by kevingadd »

chjj wrote: post #63
ben-schaaf wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you tried with firefox? Last I heard they've got far and away the fastest wasm implementation.

No. I've just been building with the WASI SDK and running the resulting binary with a small node.js wrapper script. So, I've only tested v8's WASM implementation so far. Does firefox have a headless mode, a standalone implementation, or some CLI tool I can use to run a WASM binary? Running stuff in the browser is cumbersome.

You can use jsvu to grab command-line shell binaries for spidermonkey (firefox's JS engine), v8, and jsc (safari's JS engine) to toy around with.

Re: Moving from TypeScript to Rust / WebAssembly

#67

Post by aphextron »

hardwaregeek wrote: post #29

Whenever I write Rust, I have a lot of fun, but I'm still not sold on it for most web dev. The analogy that comes to mind is that Rust is a really nice sports car with a great engine. It handles like a dream and you can feel the powerful engine humming while driving it. With the right open road, it's a great time. You can really optimize code, make great abstractions and work with data easily. Unfortunately, web dev…

This really nails why languages like PHP and Ruby have won out over static typed, compiled ones for application level web development. The web is a massive collection of disjointed, loosely coupled APIs that all (just barely) interoperate to provide a massive array of functionality. Languages that tend to work well with it are those that are highly flexible around the corner cases of these technologies, and allow you to quickly iterate through the process of gluing them together.

Re: Moving from TypeScript to Rust / WebAssembly

#68

Post by swyx »

aphextron wrote: post #67
hardwaregeek wrote: post #29

Whenever I write Rust, I have a lot of fun, but I'm still not sold on it for most web dev. The analogy that comes to mind is that Rust is a really nice sports car with a great engine. It handles like a dream and you can feel the powerful engine humming while driving it. With the right open road, it's a great time. You can really optimize code, make great abstractions and work with data easily. Unfortunately, web dev…

This really nails why languages like PHP and Ruby have won out over static typed, compiled ones for application level web development. The web is a massive collection of disjointed, loosely coupled APIs that all (just barely) interoperate to provide a massive array of functionality. Languages that tend to work well with it are those that are highly flexible around the corner cases of these technologies, and allow you…

this was historically true, but I suspect in the age of the evergreen browser this argument has been seriously dented (but not invalidated)

Re: Moving from TypeScript to Rust / WebAssembly

#69

Post by Scarbutt »

echelon wrote: post #16
melling wrote: post #2

I don’t know Rust and haven’t done JavaScript for years but isn’t JavaScript a bit more of a higher level language, which would make a developer more productive? Rust being closer to the hardware should require more code, and effort, to accomplish the same task.

> isn’t JavaScript a bit more of a higher level language Rust has zero-cost abstractions that feel like using Ruby and a rich type system that makes it incredibly expressive. Working in other languages feels like going back to assembly. I wouldn't want to design state machines in any other language. Rust's enums make it feel smooth as butter. They're a killer app. (The whole ecosystem is. Cargo. Package naming. Trait…

I have seen this being asked many times in /r/rust and 90% of the answers disagree with you. A common theme is to explore in Python then rewrite in Rust.

Re: Moving from TypeScript to Rust / WebAssembly

#70

Post by cheerlessbog »

dfee wrote: post #48
s-lambert wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dog and Person are structurally the same so you can assign a person to a dog and vice versa. But that's just how structural typing works and as a user of TypeScript I haven't run into a case where this'd be an issue.

Haha oh. Yeah, assumed that the Dog definition wasn’t worthless. Indeed TS is structurally typed. And that’s nice!

I worked on a web based editor. A library would give us a range to highlight, in 1-based coordinates. The editor control was 0-based. As you can imagine it was easy to forget to translate back and forth in one path or another. In a strongly typed language I would simply define two Range types and the compiler would eliminate the mistake. I assumed Typescript could help me in the same way but it allowed the two types to be interchanged silently because they had the same structure. Perhaps I was holding it wrong?
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