3 ms·

I was also disappointed that this isn't included in the browsers given that it was designed to be very simple to parse and compile. So I tried as an exercise to

by stagas 5y ago

I was also disappointed that this isn't included in the browsers given that it was designed to be very simple to parse and compile. So I tried as an exercise to build such a compiler[0] and indeed it was much easier than I expected (with a few shortcuts of course, being a POC). It is just 5kb gzipped and it compiles to binary most of the WAT code out there and also quite fast, just a few ms. That said, I think writing WAT by hand is only helpful for very small critical hot code, anything more complex and IMO you need an abstraction of some sort. [0]: https://github.com/stagas/wel https://github.com/stagas/wel

TekMol 5y ago
Wow, all that code is needed to feed a string to WebAssembly.instantiateStreaming()? What does the code do? I was hoping there could be a trick like feeding a "blob:..." url to instantiateStreaming() or something. Since the bottleneck of a codebase typically is a single loop, I think it often would be a good approach to rewrite that one in Webassembly by hand.
- stagas 5y ago
  You can inline the binary as base64 or simply a Uint8Array and instantiate it without having to fetch a wasm file. Many choose that approach as it also makes the library `import`-able in sync. The code I was pointing can be used to compile the WebAssembly Text format to binary and instantiate it afterwards on-the-fly, which is useful if you don't want a build step, so skipping the tooling(outside the browser) and also make edits which will then be compiled directly when the file executes. It's an option for experimentation mostly.
  - TekMol 5y ago
    Ooohh shit! Now I see that instantiateStreaming() does not accept webassembly in text format. So we need to ship a whole compiler to avoid a build step. Count me out :)
    - stagas 5y ago
      Yes, my point was that it's so trivial (and negligible in byte count size) to implement a compiler for the Webassembly text format, as the POC demonstrates, that it's curious why the browser isn't including one so that there isn't the need for extra tooling.

by stagas 5y ago

TekMol 5y ago

Wow, all that code is needed to feed a string to WebAssembly.instantiateStreaming()? What does the code do? I was hoping there could be a trick like feeding a "blob:..." url to instantiateStreaming() or something. Since the bottleneck of a codebase typically is a single loop, I think it often would be a good approach to rewrite that one in Webassembly by hand.

stagas 5y ago
You can inline the binary as base64 or simply a Uint8Array and instantiate it without having to fetch a wasm file. Many choose that approach as it also makes the library `import`-able in sync. The code I was pointing can be used to compile the WebAssembly Text format to binary and instantiate it afterwards on-the-fly, which is useful if you don't want a build step, so skipping the tooling(outside the browser) and also make edits which will then be compiled directly when the file executes. It's an option for experimentation mostly.
- TekMol 5y ago
  Ooohh shit! Now I see that instantiateStreaming() does not accept webassembly in text format. So we need to ship a whole compiler to avoid a build step. Count me out :)
  - stagas 5y ago
    Yes, my point was that it's so trivial (and negligible in byte count size) to implement a compiler for the Webassembly text format, as the POC demonstrates, that it's curious why the browser isn't including one so that there isn't the need for extra tooling.