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by ridruejo 1139 days ago
One of the aspects I find tremendously exciting about Wasm is not just the portability, security, performance, etc. but the fact that you can do this with your language of choice. Lowering the barrier to adoption without hindering some of the advanced use cases tends to work well to get developers onboard ...
1 comments
zcw100 1139 days ago
It's not quite as open as the language of your choice. There are a handful of popular languages available, Rust, C, C++ and a number of fringe languages like Zig, AssemblyScript, etc. You can run something like Python but it's a bit misleading because you're compiling the entire runtime to WebAssembly similar to how CheerpJ runs Java or Blazor runs .NET
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ridruejo 1139 days ago
How is it misleading? It is the whole point that you can compile CPython or PHP interpreters to target this as another target platform like x86 or ARM
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umvi 1139 days ago
Python performance on wasm is going to be abysmal because you're essentially running a VM inside a VM. Other languages like rust can compile directly to wasm. Until Python can do the same it will be a second or third class citizen in wasm.

Put another way, you could make one of those tier charts for WASM tooling, and if rust is in S tier, python is like C or D tier.

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ridruejo 1138 days ago
You are not running a VM inside a VM. You are compiling to another target and modern Wasm runtimes allow AOT and JIT so performance is close to native while preserving all the other goodness of Wasm (sandbox, portability to 'weird' environments like browsers and IoT, etc)
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pookeh 1139 days ago
Rust is not an interpreted language like Python. Your comment would make sense if Python code could be compiled into x86 or ARM assembly in the first place.
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selcuka 1139 days ago
> Your comment would make sense if Python code could be compiled into x86 or ARM assembly in the first place.

It can actually be compiled (or transpiled) into C code [1] with few limitations, so I can't see why not. It still requires libpython but it should be better than porting the whole interpreter to webassembly.

[1] https://github.com/Nuitka/Nuitka

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ridruejo 1138 days ago
By that logic, you can transpile your Python to C and then compile to Wasm
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