[branksy]

Fascinating! Serious question: could this turn JavaScript (technically Walt) into a serious language for scientific computation? That now runs in any browser?

E.g. Python is used a lot together with NumPy/SciPy, but for performance the actual computation in NumPy/SciPy is done in C since Python is too slow. Would it be possible to create Walt-native versions of NumPy and SciPy... e.g. NumWalt and SciWalt? Or even Jupyter notebooks based on Walt?

[mr_toad]

You could just port the C libraries that Python uses.

You might want to check that you’re actually gaining any performance, the JIT compilations of JavaScript aren’t often slow.

[dralley]

Would it not be easier to take a language with existing libraries (e.g. Julia, C++) and make it compilable to WASM?

Or even figure out how to run a Python interpreter + WASM-compiled C extensions together to be able to use Numpy, Scipy, etc.

[pjmlp]

Not really, you would be better off running that code as GLSL shaders on the GPU.