Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by brendanfh 933 days ago
Onyx is entirely independent from Wasmer. It is a separate project developed by me, over the past 3 years. It does however use Wasmer for running on Windows, MacOS, and optionally on Linux.

I started making Onyx because I simply wanted to create my own programming language for the fun of it. I choose WebAssembly as the target for my compiler because it was relatively easy to write my own full-stack solution, instead of relying on something like LLVM. That language evolved over the years until I had something I felt was worth sharing. When the Wasmer team reached out to see if I wanted to do a collaboration blog post, I said yes.

The main reason I didn't go with LLVM was simply because I wanted to write everything myself (for fun) and to have a super-fast compiler. LLVM is not the fastest backend, but it is understandable for all the optimizations that it does.
1 comments
digdugdirk 932 days ago
Very cool project! If I wanted to try it out in a repl based environment (maybe like a jupyter notebook?) where/how would you recommend I get started?
link
brendanfh 932 days ago
Onyx does not really support a REPL environment at the moment because of the way it is compiled. Its execution cannot be paused in the same way as Python or JS. If you want to give it a try without committing to installing anything, I would recommend the Onyx Playground at https://try.onyxlang.io
link
digdugdirk 932 days ago
Could you please explain a bit about what you mean by how it's compiled? My immediate thought when I saw this was dreaming of a tiny modern lisp repl that I could store in the cloud and run on any computer.

Even pointing to somewhere in the code that I could start poking around would be great.

link
brendanfh 931 days ago
The issue right now is how all WebAssembly modules in general are executed. WASM modules currently must contain everything need to run them when they are built. There is no way to dynamically define a new function or variable after they have been built, which would be required for an Onyx REPL to work.

You could definitely use Onyx to create a modern lisp interpreter that can run in the browser without any dependencies, but it might be worth porting an existing C project if that is your goal. I'm not gonna stop you from making something like that in Onyx tho; it would be very cool!

There is a however possibility for a REPL for Onyx to exist outside of the browser. This is because Onyx has another runtime it can use alongside WASM called OVMwasm. This runtime is entirely custom (you can see the source code in the 'interpreter' folder on the Onyx GitHub), so it could be modified to do non-standard things with WASM, like add new functions dynamically. That would take some work to achieve, but in theory should be possible.

link