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It is not entirely clear from the article, but apparently, they still use Java for their calculation engine. And then transpile it into JavaScript. Which makes

It is not entirely clear from the article, but apparently, they still use Java for their calculation engine. And then transpile it into JavaScript. Which makes me wonder whether instead of porting this code base to WasmGC, a partial rewrite would have helped the project’s maintain ability in the long run. Rust seems like a potentially good candidate due to its existing WebAssembly backend. WasmGC is useful for many other projects of course. But I wonder how painful it is to maintain a Java code base, which is not a great choice for client-side web apps to begin with. I remember using GWT back in the days - and that never felt like a good fit. GWT supported a whitelisted subset of the Java standard library. But the emitted Javascript code was nigh on impossible read. I don’t remember if Chrome’s developer tools already had source map support back in those days. But I doubt it. Other core Java concepts like class loaders are equally unsuited for JavaScript. Not to mention that primitive data types are different in Java and JavaScript. The same is true for collections, where many popular Java classes do not have direct counterparts in JavaScript.

jsiepkes 2y ago
The code wasn't really ported to WasmGC. They now compile the same code base to WasmGC with J2CL where before they used J2CL to transpile it to JavaScript.
szundi 2y ago
Somehow Java is the ultimate always the best stuff to do something even transpiled. Java is easy to build upon on the long run and can save itself and the codebase to new times.
azakai 2y ago
Rewriting a large codebase with many years of work behind it to a totally new language is a pretty big task, and often ends up introducing new bugs. But I do agree Java has downsides. A more practical conversion would be to Kotlin. That's a much closer language to Java, and it can interop, which means you can rewrite it incrementally, like adopting TypeScript in a JavaScript project. Also, Kotlin uses WasmGC, which avoids the downsides of linear memory - it can use the browser's memory management instead of shipping its own, etc., which is an improvement over C++ and Rust.

jsiepkes 2y ago

The code wasn't really ported to WasmGC. They now compile the same code base to WasmGC with J2CL where before they used J2CL to transpile it to JavaScript.

szundi 2y ago

Somehow Java is the ultimate always the best stuff to do something even transpiled. Java is easy to build upon on the long run and can save itself and the codebase to new times.

azakai 2y ago

Rewriting a large codebase with many years of work behind it to a totally new language is a pretty big task, and often ends up introducing new bugs. But I do agree Java has downsides. A more practical conversion would be to Kotlin. That's a much closer language to Java, and it can interop, which means you can rewrite it incrementally, like adopting TypeScript in a JavaScript project. Also, Kotlin uses WasmGC, which avoids the downsides of linear memory - it can use the browser's memory management instead of shipping its own, etc., which is an improvement over C++ and Rust.