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I think there is a ton of room left on the table here for innovation. Context: as far as I know Electron is still the king if you want to do (unsafe but perfor

I think there is a ton of room left on the table here for innovation. Context: as far as I know Electron is still the king if you want to do (unsafe but performant) "IPC/RPC" between native and a webview. All of the other options that exist in other languages (Deno, Rust, you name it) do the same "stringified JSON back and forth" which really isn't great for performance in my opinion. It'd be cool if (obviously in a sandboxed or secure way) you could opt in to something albeit a bit reckless, but some way to provide native methods for the WASM part of V8 and its WebView (thinking Electron-esque here) to call.

boomskats 1y ago
I'm not sure if I'm understanding you correctly, but vanilla wasm ipc works by sharing linear memory, where it's up to the implementation to choose the data encoding (arrow/proto/whatever). In the case of wasm-bindgen's dom manipulation api, the implementation serialises individual commands and sends them over the boundary, with any string params for each command being deserialised individually, and this project improves on that by batching them all into one big string thus reducing the deserialisation overhead. However, the string encoding is specific to that use case - it's not a general wasm ipc mechanism. VSCode IPC is kinda similar as it's designed to facilitate comms over an enforced process isolation barrier to protect the main thread from slow extensions etc. but it's actually IPC there (as in, there are multiple processes at the os level). The wasm/js stuff is handled within the same v8 context - it's not actually ipc. (Happy to be corrected here, but this is my understanding)
- MuffinFlavored 1y ago
  https://github.com/webview/webview_deno https://github.com/webview/webview_deno Tell me how you'd do "native C/C++ FFI (to like a .so or .dylib or .dll)" between the webview using WASM or anything other than "WebKit's built in JSON-string based IPC" Like a <button> that triggers a DLL call. How would you achieve it with WASM? How does WASM act as the bridge to the DOM and/or native? It doesn't, right?
  - Evan-Almloff 1y ago
    Most of the optimizations apply equally to calling into webview JS from a native application for something like dom manipulation. There is a wry example that uses the system webview in the repo: https://github.com/ealmloff/sledgehammer_bindgen/blob/master/examples/wry.rs https://github.com/ealmloff/sledgehammer_bindgen/blob/master...
    - MuffinFlavored 1y ago
      https://github.com/ealmloff/sledgehammer_bindgen/blob/master/examples/wry.rs#L383-L426 https://github.com/ealmloff/sledgehammer_bindgen/blob/master... This is fetch(), which I have to imagine is much less performant than Electron with a require('native-module')
nicoburns 1y ago
We're building a brand new webview that has a native code (Rust) API to the DOM. That way your native extension doesn't have to go through JavaScript at all. Currently it doesn't have any JS support, but it could be added. https://github.com/DioxusLabs/blitz/ https://github.com/DioxusLabs/blitz/
- MuffinFlavored 1y ago
  How could/would you do "DOM event -> native FFI dlsym-type call"?
  - nicoburns 1y ago
    You could either use Dioxus-Native which combines Blitz with Dioxus (a React-like framework but in Rust). Or you could implement the EventHandler trait https://docs.rs/blitz-dom/latest/blitz_dom/trait.EventHandler.html https://docs.rs/blitz-dom/latest/blitz_dom/trait.EventHandle... In either case you will recieve the event as a Rust struct passed to a Rust function. So you could call Rust depdencies directly, and C dependencies would just require Rust bindings.
    - MuffinFlavored 1y ago
      I see. It's a new rendering engine, not "Blink/WebKit/etc.". Am I right that WebKit does not support what you and I are discussing equivalent wise? Passing structs or "binary" events?
      - nicoburns 1y ago
        > I see. It's a new rendering engine, not "Blink/WebKit/etc." Correct > Am I right that WebKit does not support what you and I are discussing equivalent wise? Passing structs or "binary" events? I'm not sure. If I wanted to do this I'd probably look into https://ultralig.ht/ https://ultralig.ht/ which is a commercial fork of webkit. See: https://docs.ultralig.ht/docs/calling-a-c-function-from-js https://docs.ultralig.ht/docs/calling-a-c-function-from-js

boomskats 1y ago

I'm not sure if I'm understanding you correctly, but vanilla wasm ipc works by sharing linear memory, where it's up to the implementation to choose the data encoding (arrow/proto/whatever). In the case of wasm-bindgen's dom manipulation api, the implementation serialises individual commands and sends them over the boundary, with any string params for each command being deserialised individually, and this project improves on that by batching them all into one big string thus reducing the deserialisation overhead. However, the string encoding is specific to that use case - it's not a general wasm ipc mechanism. VSCode IPC is kinda similar as it's designed to facilitate comms over an enforced process isolation barrier to protect the main thread from slow extensions etc. but it's actually IPC there (as in, there are multiple processes at the os level). The wasm/js stuff is handled within the same v8 context - it's not actually ipc. (Happy to be corrected here, but this is my understanding)

MuffinFlavored 1y ago
https://github.com/webview/webview_deno https://github.com/webview/webview_deno Tell me how you'd do "native C/C++ FFI (to like a .so or .dylib or .dll)" between the webview using WASM or anything other than "WebKit's built in JSON-string based IPC" Like a <button> that triggers a DLL call. How would you achieve it with WASM? How does WASM act as the bridge to the DOM and/or native? It doesn't, right?
- Evan-Almloff 1y ago
  Most of the optimizations apply equally to calling into webview JS from a native application for something like dom manipulation. There is a wry example that uses the system webview in the repo: https://github.com/ealmloff/sledgehammer_bindgen/blob/master/examples/wry.rs https://github.com/ealmloff/sledgehammer_bindgen/blob/master...
  - MuffinFlavored 1y ago
    https://github.com/ealmloff/sledgehammer_bindgen/blob/master/examples/wry.rs#L383-L426 https://github.com/ealmloff/sledgehammer_bindgen/blob/master... This is fetch(), which I have to imagine is much less performant than Electron with a require('native-module')

nicoburns 1y ago

We're building a brand new webview that has a native code (Rust) API to the DOM. That way your native extension doesn't have to go through JavaScript at all. Currently it doesn't have any JS support, but it could be added. https://github.com/DioxusLabs/blitz/ https://github.com/DioxusLabs/blitz/

MuffinFlavored 1y ago
How could/would you do "DOM event -> native FFI dlsym-type call"?
- nicoburns 1y ago
  You could either use Dioxus-Native which combines Blitz with Dioxus (a React-like framework but in Rust). Or you could implement the EventHandler trait https://docs.rs/blitz-dom/latest/blitz_dom/trait.EventHandler.html https://docs.rs/blitz-dom/latest/blitz_dom/trait.EventHandle... In either case you will recieve the event as a Rust struct passed to a Rust function. So you could call Rust depdencies directly, and C dependencies would just require Rust bindings.
  - MuffinFlavored 1y ago
    I see. It's a new rendering engine, not "Blink/WebKit/etc.". Am I right that WebKit does not support what you and I are discussing equivalent wise? Passing structs or "binary" events?
    - nicoburns 1y ago
      > I see. It's a new rendering engine, not "Blink/WebKit/etc." Correct > Am I right that WebKit does not support what you and I are discussing equivalent wise? Passing structs or "binary" events? I'm not sure. If I wanted to do this I'd probably look into https://ultralig.ht/ https://ultralig.ht/ which is a commercial fork of webkit. See: https://docs.ultralig.ht/docs/calling-a-c-function-from-js https://docs.ultralig.ht/docs/calling-a-c-function-from-js