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by bluejekyll 2290 days ago
To me the big improvement over Lua won’t be security, or necessarily performance. It’s the ability to target a WASM runtime with your desired language, and it would still be a safe environment.

Be it Rust, C, C++, Typescript, and I bet there will be a Lua interpreter in WASM at some point too.

It will be more flexible, and possibly more performant.

1 comments

I think the future is still hazy for managed languages, the GC side of Wasm is still in the design phase and it's not clear how widely it will be implemented. And it's been quiet for a long time, is the effor even alive? (https://github.com/WebAssembly/proposals/issues/16)

If it's going to encompass the possibility to hook into the JS side GC engine, this might not be implemented at all in headless Wasm applications, and so you wouldn't be able to use the GC'd languages on those platforms, just C(++)/Rust. Which is not very attractive compared to the easier / safer high level languages most programmers are used to.

You’re right. I should have said AssemblyScript, not TypeScript.

Also, As someone familiar with Rust, it is a very high-level language. It’s zero-overhead features make it a bit of a steep learning curve, but you rarely need to drop to its low-level unsafe features.

That being said, incorporating it into a new WASM environment probably means doing a lot of low-level stuff.

You can use GC languages. One of them is Go. WASM support is pretty good though direct dom access or some well tested wrappers would make it even better.