News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on Walt: JavaScript-like syntax for WebAssembly.

Re:Walt: JavaScript-like syntax for WebAssembly by branksy on Wednesday October 10, 2018 @10:35PM (#18190640)
Fascinating! Serious question: could this turn JavaScript (technically Walt) into a serious language for scientific computation? That now runs in any browser?

E.g. Python is used a lot together with NumPy/SciPy, but for performance the actual computation in NumPy/SciPy is done in C since Python is too slow. Would it be possible to create Walt-native versions of NumPy and SciPy... e.g. NumWalt and SciWalt? Or even Jupyter notebooks based on Walt?

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Walt: JavaScript-like syntax for WebAssembly by mr_toad on Thursday October 11, 2018 @01:00AM (#18191050)
You could just port the C libraries that Python uses.

You might want to check that you’re actually gaining any performance, the JIT compilations of JavaScript aren’t often slow.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Walt: JavaScript-like syntax for WebAssembly by dralley on Wednesday October 10, 2018 @10:51PM (#18190685)
Would it not be easier to take a language with existing libraries (e.g. Julia, C++) and make it compilable to WASM?

Or even figure out how to run a Python interpreter + WASM-compiled C extensions together to be able to use Numpy, Scipy, etc.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Walt: JavaScript-like syntax for WebAssembly by pjmlp on Thursday October 11, 2018 @03:46AM (#18191633)
Not really, you would be better off running that code as GLSL shaders on the GPU.
[ Parent | on HN ]