Stream: general

Topic: I've fallen down the WASM rabbit hole

Philippe Vaillancourt (Dec 31 2023 at 18:05):

Hi, I'm new to the community, but I'm super excited to be here.

A week ago, I was pondering my next side project. I settled on implementing a toolchain for a programming language. I've implemented interpreters and compilers before, but this time I wanted to better understand what goes into making all of the useful tools around one. I'm talking about things like:

• A compiler/interpreter/runtime
• A language server
• A debugger
• A profiler
• A formatter
• A package manager
• A website with quality documentation

I'm a one man show, and this is purely for education purposes, so all of this stuff would be relatively barebones. In that vein, I'm not planning to invent a new language but instead will implement all of this for a slightly extended dialect of Tiny-BASIC, a super simple language.

One of my first thought was: wouldn't it be cool if I used wasm as a source code compilation target and wrote a simple VM directly in WAT?

I have limited WASM experience, mostly from compiling a few rust libraries to wasm so I could use them on the web. So I started researching WASM, which led me to: binaryen, wasmtime, cranelift, binaryen.js, wasmer, jco, the component model, WIT, warg...

I realized a few thing:

• I think I can leverage the WASM ecosystem to achieve my goals
• In the process I can probably contribute to some of these projects which are still in early stages (looking at you warg).
• I'm probably going to need a bit of guidance to choose the right mix and match of all these wasm tools and abstractions in order to achieve what I want.

That's it, just wanted to introduce myself. I'll post specific questions in other thread/channels or whatever this Zulip thing calls them.:wink:

Last updated: Oct 23 2024 at 20:03 UTC