DRdrogus·Nov 10, 2024
I haven't seen Wasmnizer before. This looks like a cool project and I'll be definitely taking a closer look when I have some time, but for now I just took a quick peek.
The main difference is obviously TypeScript vs JavaScript. Because they are not bothering with JavaScript, some stuff is much easier, like for example if a function specifies an argument as `number`, you can statically compile it to use a type representing a number (possibly even without heap allocations) instead of passing something like `anyref` everywhere and doing typechecks.
The second big difference is that they seem to use types imported form the host. This means they can implement part of the types/builtins/methods on the host (which is easier, cause in JavaScript you simply use JavaScript for defining host stuff) at a cost of doing more calls from WASM to the host
Read the rest
. And then you need the host to implement those functions (here is an example for JS host: https://github.com/web-devkits/Wasmnizer-ts/blob/main/tools/...). My plan for Jaws is to only rely on WASI, so that you can run your program on any runtime that supports WASI.
I'm also not sure about their approach to semantics. I can't quite grasp how they implement for example scopes. I tried to compile a small TS script that relies on scope, like:
let message: string = 'Hello, World!';
function test() {
console.log(message);
}
test()
And the result was console.log printing null. I'm not sure if I'm doing something wrong or is it expected, but I'll ask them in an issue later.