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by abuldauskas
2805 days ago
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I wrote/maintain Walt. This question comes up a bunch. The two projects are really similar no doubt. I can't speak for AssemblyScript, but my own motivation was simple. I wanted to learn WebAssembly and I wanted an accessible platform to do so with. At the time this wasn't really possible, tools like emscripten took forever to set up and were clunky to use. Plus I knew C already, I wanted to learn WebAssembly instead. So where Walt is an attempt to write WebAssembly with a familiar syntax, AssemblyScript is an attempt to compile TypeScript to WebAssembly. To do so AssemblyScript comes with many more niceties/features out of the box IIRC, like optional(?) GC for example. Walt makes no such attempts and takes a more DIY approach. Walt also has language extensions, via customizable syntax and compiler pipeline, where AssemblyScript is a TypeScript compiler more or less. My hope is that this allows for a babel-like situation for WebAssembly in the future via the tooling setup for Walt. I don't think this is a goal of AssemblyScript. |
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IMO this is a good decision. I much prefer a platform with a small API than I can personally extend over a large platform that has specific customization options or lots of extra features that all just "kind of" solve whatever problem I have.
Reading this makes me more interested in the project than I was before.
One quick recommendation, it was kind of hard to find the documentation for the Webpack free compiler (https://www.npmjs.com/package/walt-compiler). This is purely anecdotal, but I suspect that at least some of the people who are turned on by having a low-level library that doesn't include Typescript niceties will be turned off by seeing the quick-start immediately say to install Webpack. Might be a good idea to have the compiler documentation inside the wiki alongside the quick-start?