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by lennoff 1755 days ago
Tangentially related question: could Nuitka target WebAssembly, given that according to their overview page, they translate Python into C? Usually when it comes to Python -> WebAssembly, the biggest problem is the lack of GC in the WebAssembly spec (as far as I understand), and I'm wondering if this would be an issue for Nuitka as well...
2 comments
codeflo 1755 days ago
Of course you can build a GC in WebAssembly. You might have to avoid the native stack and lose some performance that way, but that shouldn’t be too bad I think.

One problem is that this GC doesn’t interact with the browser’s GC in any way. So you have painful memory management interactions when (for example) a DOM event handler references a WebAssembly object which in turn holds a reference to a browser object, possibly with cycles (so simple reference counting isn’t enough).

You can fall back to manual memory management here, but that’s painful to use. To make this work seamlessly, you need a way to trace references across both heaps in one swoop. Last I checked, there was standardization work underway to enable that.

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BiteCode_dev 1755 days ago
Yes but pyodide is probably better suited for that and can load uncompiled python code.

See :

https://github.com/pyodide/pyodide

And an example featuring a pure client side jupyter instance :

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28377550

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