Simon Willison’s Weblog

talk.wasm (via) “Talk with an Artificial Intelligence in your browser”. Absolutely stunning demo which loads the Whisper speech recognition model (75MB) and a GPT-2 model (240MB) and executes them both in your browser via WebAssembly, then uses the Web Speech API to talk back to you. The result is a full speak-with-an-AI interface running entirely client-side. GPT-2 sadly mostly generates gibberish but the fact that this works at all is pretty astonishing. # 7th December 2022, 10:52 pm

Microsoft Flight Simulator: WebAssembly (via) This is such a smart application of WebAssembly: it can now be used to write extensions for Microsoft Flight Simulator, which means you can run code from untrusted sources safely in a sandbox. I’m really looking forward to more of this kind of usage—I love the idea of finally having a robust sandbox for running things like plugins. # 24th November 2022, 2:08 am

PyScript Updates: Bytecode Alliance, Pyodide, and MicroPython. Absolutely huge news about Python on the Web tucked into this announcement: Anaconda have managed to get a version of MicroPython compiled to WebAssembly running in the browser. Pyodide weighs in at around 6.5MB compressed, but the MicroPython build is just 303KB—the size of a large image. This makes Python in the web browser applicable to so many more potential areas. # 9th November 2022, 10:26 pm

About the sqlite3 WASM/JS Subproject. SQLite now maintains an official WebAssembly build. It’s influenced by sql.js but is a fresh implementation with its own API design. It also supports Origin-Private FileSystem (OPFS)—a very new standard which doesn’t yet have wide browser support that allows websites to save and load files using a dedicated folder on the host machine. # 28th October 2022, 11:05 pm

libsql (via) A brand new Apache 2 licensed fork of SQLite. The README explains the rationale behind the project: SQLite itself is open source but not open contribution, and this fork aims to try out new ideas. The most interesting to me so far is a plan to support user defined functions implemented in WebAssembly. The project also intends to use Rust for new feature development. # 4th October 2022, 4:13 pm

mod_wasm: run WebAssembly with Apache (via) Brand new Apache module from a team at VMWare: mod_wasm builds on top of wasmtime to let you write WebAssembly programs that are exposed to the world by Apache, using a mechanism that looks similar to old CGI scripts (headers passed in environment variables, request body sent to standard input). Includes a demo Docker image that runs using Python-compiled-to-WebAssembly. # 4th October 2022, 12:53 am

Fastly Compute@Edge JS Runtime (via) Fastly’s JavaScript runtime, designed to run at the edge of their CDN, uses the Mozilla SpiderMonkey JavaScript engine compiled to WebAssembly. # 20th September 2022, 10:20 pm

Wasmtime Reaches 1.0: Fast, Safe and Production Ready! The Bytecode Alliance are making some confident promises in this post about the performance and stability of their Wasmtime WebAssembly runtime. They also highlight some exciting use-cases for WebAssembly on the server, including safe 3rd party plugin execution and User Defined Functions running inside databases. # 20th September 2022, 10:11 pm

Crunchy Data: Learn Postgres at the Playground (via) Crunchy Data have a new PostgreSQL tutorial series, with a very cool twist: they have a build of PostgreSQL compiled to WebAssembly which runs in the browser, so each tutorial is accompanied by a working psql terminal that lets you try out the tutorial contents interactively. It even has support for PostGIS, though that particular tutorial has to load 80MB of assets in order to get it to work! # 17th August 2022, 6:30 pm

Introducing sqlite-lines—a SQLite extension for reading files line-by-line (via) Alex Garcia wrote a brilliant C module for SQLIte which adds functions (and a table-valued function) for efficiently reading newline-delimited text into SQLite. When combined with SQLite’s built-in JSON features this means you can read a huge newline-delimited JSON file into SQLite in a streaming fashion so it doesn’t exhaust memory for a large file. Alex also compiled the extension to WebAssembly, and his post here is an Observable notebook post that lets you exercise the code directly. # 30th July 2022, 7:18 pm

The State of WebAssembly 2022. Colin Eberhardt talks through the results of the State of WebAssembly 2022 survey. Rust continues to dominate as the most popular language for working to WebAssembly, but Python has a notable increase of interest. # 20th June 2022, 6:07 pm

sqlite-utils 3.26.1 (via) I released sqlite-utils 3.36.1 with one tiny but exciting feature: I fixed its one dependency that wasn’t published as a pure Python wheel, which means it can now be used with Pyodide—Python compiled to WebAssembly running in your browser! # 2nd May 2022, 6:43 pm

PyScript demos (via) PyScript was announced at PyCon this morning. It’s a new open source project that provides Web Components built on top of Pyodide, allowing you to use Python directly within your HTML pages in a way that is executed using a WebAssembly copy of Python running in your browser. These demos really help illustrate what it can do—it’s a fascinating new piece of the Python web ecosystem. # 30th April 2022, 9:50 pm

Mac OS 8 emulated in WebAssembly (via) Absolutely incredible project by Mihai Parparita. This is a full, working copy of Mac OS 8 (from 1997) running in your browser via WebAssembly—and it’s fully loaded with games and applications too. I played with Photoshop 3.0 and Civilization and there’s so much more on there to explore too—I finally get to try out HyperCard! # 26th April 2022, 7:16 pm

WebAssembly in my Browser Desktop Environment (via) Dustin Brett built the WebAssembly demo to end all WebAssembly demos: his daedalOS browser desktop environment simulates a Windows-style operating system, and bundles WebAssembly projects that include v86 for 486 emulation, js-dos for DOS emulation to run Doom, BoxedWine to run Wine applications like Notepad++, Ruffle to emulate Flash, ffmpeg.wasm to power audio and video conversion, WASM-ImageMagick for image conversion, Pyodide for a Python shell and more besides that! # 29th March 2022, 1:26 am

webvm.io (via) This is one heck of a tech demo: it’s a full copy of Debian, compiled to WebAssembly and running in your browser. It’s fully stocked with Python, Perl, Ruby, Node.js and even a working gcc compiler! The underlying technology, CheerpX, is a closed-source WebAssembly virtualization platform. # 2nd February 2022, 2:29 am

SQLime: SQLite Playground (via) Anton Zhiyanov built this useful mobile-friendly online playground for trying things out it SQLite. It uses the sql.js library which compiles SQLite to WebAssembly, so it runs everything in the browser—but it also supports saving your work to Gists via the GitHub API. The JavaScript source code is fun to read: the site doesn’t use npm or Webpack or similar, opting instead to implement everything library-free using modern JavaScript modules and Web Components. # 17th January 2022, 7:08 pm

Announcing Parcel CSS: A new CSS parser, compiler, and minifier written in Rust! An interesting thing about tools like this being written in Rust is that since the Rust-to-WASM pipeline is well trodden at this point, the live demo that this announcement links to runs entirely in the browser. # 13th January 2022, 8:40 pm