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by thomasfromcdnjs 754 days ago
How is this project related to the work you do? e.g. instadeq, gloodata

Why do you need WASM?

2 comments

it's not that related, I like to create compilers/transpilers/weird languages, see the "Language Projects" section here: https://marianoguerra.github.io/

But there's a relation, two years ago I prototyped a thing that tried to make a headless version of instadeq that could run in the browser and the server, the idea was a dataflow language where the data was represented as apache arrow tables where filters and transformation expressions where compiled to wasm. The prototype kind of worked and I had a lot of fun, I thought about sharing the fun by writing a small book about creating 10 toy languages that compiled to Wasm, I shared the idea with Patrick, he said he was thinking about something similar and the idea evolved into the current book.

In-browser data analysis is a great place to use Wasm. Javascript is great, but larger datasets really benefit from SIMD + tighter memory control/controlled memory layouts.

Some interesting data-related Wasm projects:

- DuckDB Wasm | https://github.com/duckdb/duckdb-wasm

- Row Zero | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39551064

- PGLite | https://github.com/electric-sql/pglite

Thanks for this answer