Posts tagged javascript, webassembly in 2024
Filters: Year: 2024 × javascript × webassembly × Sorted by date
Notes on running Go in the browser with WebAssembly (via) Neat, concise tutorial by Eli Bendersky on compiling Go applications that can then be loaded into a browser using WebAssembly and integrated with JavaScript. Go functions can be exported to JavaScript like this:
js.Global().Set("calcHarmonic", jsCalcHarmonic)
And Go code can even access the DOM using a pattern like this:
doc := js.Global().Get("document")
inputElement := doc.Call("getElementById", "timeInput")
input := inputElement.Get("value")
Bundling the WASM Go runtime involves a 2.5MB file load, but there’s also a TinyGo alternative which reduces that size to a fourth.
Experimenting with local alt text generation in Firefox Nightly (via) The PDF editor in Firefox (confession: I did not know Firefox ships with a PDF editor) is getting an experimental feature that can help suggest alt text for images for the human editor to then adapt and improve on.
This is a great application of AI, made all the more interesting here because Firefox will run a local model on-device for this, using a custom trained model they describe as "our 182M parameters model using a Distilled version of GPT-2 alongside a Vision Transformer (ViT) image encoder".
The model uses WebAssembly with ONNX running in Transfomers.js, and will be downloaded the first time the feature is put to use.
Pyodide 0.26 Release (via) PyOdide provides Python packaged for browser WebAssembly alongside an ecosystem of additional tools and libraries to help Python and JavaScript work together.
The latest release bumps the Python version up to 3.12, and also adds support for pygame-ce, allowing games written using pygame to run directly in the browser.
The PyOdide community also just landed a 14-month-long PR adding support to cibuildwheel, which should make it easier to ship binary wheels targeting PyOdide.
Figma’s journey to TypeScript: Compiling away our custom programming language (via) I love a good migration story. Figma had their own custom language that compiled to JavaScript, called Skew. As WebAssembly support in browsers emerged and improved the need for Skew’s performance optimizations reduced, and TypeScript’s maturity and popularity convinced them to switch.
Rather than doing a stop-the-world rewrite they built a transpiler from Skew to TypeScript, enabling a multi-year migration without preventing their product teams from continuing to make progress on new features.
Introducing Enhance WASM (via) “Backend agnostic server-side rendering (SSR) for Web Components”—fascinating new project from Brian LeRoux and Begin.
The idea here is to provide server-side rendering of Web Components using WebAssembly that can run on any platform that is supported within the Extism WASM ecosystem.
The key is the enhance-ssr.wasm bundle, a 4.1MB WebAssembly version of the enhance-ssr JavaScript library, compiled using the Extism JavaScript PDK (Plugin Development Kit) which itself bundles a WebAssembly version of QuickJS.
The Dropflow Playground (via) Dropflow is a “CSS layout engine” written in TypeScript and taking advantage of the HarfBuzz text shaping engine (used by Chrome, Android, Firefox and more) compiled to WebAssembly to implement glyph layout.
This linked demo is fascinating: on the left hand side you can edit HTML with inline styles, and the right hand side then updates live to show that content rendered by Dropflow in a canvas element.
Why would you want this? It lets you generate images and PDFs with excellent performance using your existing knowledge HTML and CSS. It’s also just really cool!