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If you were creating a new general purpose language language today would you target WASM? And what's the latest on garbage collection for WASM?
by ledgerdev 9y ago
If you were creating a new general purpose language language today would you target WASM? And what's the latest on garbage collection for WASM?
- sondr3 9y agoIf most of the more recent languages are anything to go by you'd target LLVM and in the future get a WASM support for free.
- kodablah 9y agoAs WASM gets higher level constructs like structs and GC, you might be wiser to compile to WASM (assuming the WASM-to-LLVM backend is high quality). WASM is primarily focused on being cross-platform and deterministic. I remember when Rust was being written, the devs complained about platform-specific LLVM IR they had to emit. The big question is who will make the first WASM stdlib iface so backends can implement it. Otherwise, you might leverage LLVM right now because you have libc.
- yodon 9y agoGarbage collection is a "Post-MVP" task[0], which is presumably why the official .NET projects haven't formally started targeting WebAsm yet. [0] https://github.com/WebAssembly/design/issues/1079 https://github.com/WebAssembly/design/issues/1079
- ledgerdev 9y agoGreat to know it's on the roadmap. Once a GC is in place, WASM seems like the universal platform of the future for computing. Fast startup, efficient, and the same everywhere. We were supposed to get a world of hundreds or thousands of cores for each application, but reality is most everything is moving towards small single threaded in the cloud like serverless.