web2js

Have you seen this one: https://github.com/kisonecat/web2js It's TeX in wasm implemented by writing a pascal to wasm compiler, which seemed like a novel approach. (TeX is written in pascal and typically translated to C before building.) TeX itself is a 500kb wasm file (compresses to 90k), but the images get much bigger with things like LaTeX pre-loaded. (The author uses it to run tikz in a browser in this repository: https://github.com/kisonecat/tikzjax)

Is this related to web2js[1], which has been around for a while? It compiles the pascal code of TeX to wasm. It looks like the live demo is no longer up, but it did run latex in the browser and render the dvi output to html. The wasm for TeX is about 495kb / 88kb compressed, but the memory image for LaTeX was a bit larger. [1]: https://github.com/kisonecat/web2js

Typically TeX is translated from Pascal to C too, via web2c. But there also is a Pascal to WASM compiler out there, which was written specifically for TeX: https://github.com/kisonecat/web2js TeX itself is only about 500kb of wasm, uncompressed, but the memory images with LaTeX loaded are quite a bit larger.

When I last looked, it seemed like WASM blobs just take arrays of numbers and return arrays of numbers. No objects, strings, or DOM elements, so I think it'd be tough to do web dev in wasm as it stands. And you need javascript glue if you want anything in the way of side effects. There is, however, quite a bit you can do in it. TeX has been compiled to wasm[1], it's about 600kb uncompressed 90k compressed (the memory image with latex loaded is about 6MB compressed though - latex is a beast). I think anything computationally intensive would be a good candidate for wasm (it has int64). 1: https://github.com/kisonecat/web2js

I implemented a TeX engine in WebAssembly so you really can run TeX in the browser. You can see a demo of this at https://tex.rossprogram.org/ and at https://github.com/kisonecat/web2js you can find a Pascal compiler that targets WebAssembly which can compile Knuth's TeX. Interesting primitives like \directjs are also implemented, so you can execute javascript from inside TeX. The rendering is handled with https://github.com/kisonecat/dvi2html for which I finally fixed some font problems. To make it relatively fast, the TeX engine gets snapshotted and shipped to the browser with much of TeXlive already loaded. So even things like TikZ work reasonably well. There is of course a lot more to do! The plan is to convert ximera.osu.edu to this new backend by the fall.