6 ms·
Interesting technical achievement but what would this be used for in practical terms?
by buggery 1y ago
Interesting technical achievement but what would this be used for in practical terms?
- jes5199 1y agoyeah why would anyone want to run code on a website
- swannodette 1y agoLoading 50mb of WASM is a big tradeoff just to run code on a website.
- tuveson 1y agoLoading time is pretty rough, but it seems responsive enough after the initial load. Probably as fast or faster than downloading and installing GHC locally.
- wslh 1y agoI would assume that in the near future one can preload, cache, update selected WASM packages. I also imagine that sooner than that we can preload open models in the browser to run the natively instead of only invoking third parties (e.g. window.ai in the DOM)
- extraduder_ire 1y agoFor comparison: the homepage of cnn.com right now is 33.37MB on my machine. 16.82MB of which is JavaScript.
- bqmjjx0kac 1y agoIt would be more plausibly practical if GHC could now target wasm, but this announcement is actually about being able to run the compiler itself in the browser.
- tempay 1y agoIt can target wasm, the point of the post is that it’s now mature enough to be able to build itself for wasm and run in a browser.
- Jaxan 1y agoThis is a show case of the wasm backend
- whateveracct 1y agoGHC is built with GHC lol
- 0x264 1y agoTeaching
- fuzzy_biscuit 1y agoI think the immediate and obvious case would be educational materials. Other than that, technical achievements need not always be practical to be cool :)
- linhns 1y agoAgreed. Too many people said Haskell is only for academia, yet we’re seeing more quality software being released in Haskell over the past few years.
- GiorgioG 1y agoWe are? Please share.
- Zambyte 1y agoPandoc is the first thing that comes to mind, but I also believe I have seen an uptick in software that I use being written in Haskell lately, though I can't remember what else off the top of my head.
- kreyenborgi 1y agoI don't have the same impression, but https://github.com/PostgREST/postgrest https://github.com/PostgREST/postgrest and https://github.com/koalaman/shellcheck https://github.com/koalaman/shellcheck are some popular ones that may be useful to hn'ers. And https://github.com/mchav/dataframe?tab=readme-ov-file#dataframe https://github.com/mchav/dataframe?tab=readme-ov-file#datafr... is a library/framework that has had quite some velocity lately
- whateveracct 1y agohttps://mercury.com https://mercury.com
- simonmic 1y agohttps://joyful.com/Haskell#What+are+some+Haskell+apps https://joyful.com/Haskell#What+are+some+Haskell+apps
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- anon291 1y agoCompilers are complicated. WASM has been a priority for the Haskell community for a while. Demonstrating GHC's ability to compile itself to WASM is thus a show that it is robust enough to compile a very complicated program into this backen.d
- IshKebab 1y agoHave you ever used Godbolt? The Rust playground? The Typescript's playground? The Go playground? It lets you have that without the pain of hosting compilers server side.
- westurner 1y agoFrom "WebR – R in the Browser" (2025 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44999706 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44999706 : > jupyterlite-xeus builds jupyterlite, Jupyter xeus kernels, and the specified dependencies to WASM with packages from conda-forge or emscripten-forge. jupyterlite/xeus https://github.com/jupyterlite/xeus https://github.com/jupyterlite/xeus There may be an easy way to wrap GHC with jupyterlite/xeus, with Haskell's lazy evaluation; xeus-haskell or xeus-ghc?
- s-macke 1y agoI will give a lecture about Haskell next week and might use this website for demonstration.
- pkage 1y agoIn addition to the other responses, it's also worth noting that wasm itself is useful outside of the web itself; e.g. in containerized applications.
- kreyenborgi 1y agoFor one, it demonstrates how far the ghc wasm backend has come, in that such a large system as ghc itself can now run in wasm