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LibreCAD in the Browser
4 days ago
- The author needed a quick 2D drawing tool accessible in a browser without installation, leading to porting LibreCAD to WebAssembly via AI prompting.
- The port relies on Qt's WebAssembly support and WebAssembly JSPI to handle nested modal dialogs and event loops, which traditional Asyncify couldn't manage.
- Performance optimizations included switching the backing store format to ARGB32 for faster rendering and bundling fonts/patterns for offline use.
- File operations are handled through JavaScript shims and MEMFS, with settings persisted via IndexedDB and exports (PDF, SVG) working via browser downloads.
- The final build is ~18 MB compressed, runs in Chromium-based browsers, and keeps changes minimal behind conditionals to maintain desktop compatibility.
WATaBoy: JIT-Ing Game Boy Instructions to WASM Beats a Native Interpreter
6 days ago
- The project explores using WebAssembly as a target for just-in-time compilation to bypass iOS's JIT restrictions, demonstrating that a Game Boy emulator's JIT-to-Wasm can outperform a native interpreter.
- Implementation involves generating WebAssembly bytecode at runtime in Rust, linking it via JavaScript, and using call_indirect for execution, with benchmarks showing speed improvements of ~1.2x over native interpreters.
- Results indicate cross-browser compatibility with Safari performing best, and future work includes optimizing the PPU emulation and improving code generation tools for broader adoption in emulation.
WASM on the JVM Ships Under the Bytecode Alliance
6 days ago
- Endive 1.0, the pure-Java WebAssembly runtime, has been officially released under the Bytecode Alliance.
- It replaces Chicory with minimal migration, offering the same API and codebase but under new governance.
- New features include full support for WasmGC, enabling integration with languages like Kotlin/Wasm and Dart, and tail call optimizations for improved performance.
- A new library, treesitter4j, compiles tree-sitter and its grammars to Wasm, providing a Java API for parsing various languages without JNI.
- Endive can host Wasm workloads, as demonstrated in a wasmCloud host and Eclipse Vert.x app, and has been stress-tested by running javac and Scala.js as Wasm.
Lunatic: An Erlang-inspired runtime for WebAssembly
3 days ago
- Lunatic is an open-source WebAssembly runtime inspired by Erlang.
- It provides isolated, lightweight processes for high concurrency and fault tolerance.
- Features include performance through JIT-compiled Wasm, security via capability limits, and distributed clustering.
- Applications are portable across architectures and OSes, compiled once to WebAssembly.
- Supervision trees enable monitoring and recovery of failing processes.
Wasmer: Fast, secure, lightweight containers based on WebAssembly
3 days ago
- Introduces WebAssembly-based container technology for secure and fast application execution across multiple platforms.
- Highlights cost-effective scaling with no overpayment for unused capacity, ensuring effortless traffic management.
- Features include seamless local-to-global deployment, millisecond startup times, built-in security via sandboxing, and flexible SDK support.
Scheme Is a Hoot
7 hours ago
- The author is learning Scheme and implementing physics concepts, compiling to the Web using Hoot.
- Hoot is unstable (version 0.9.0), with decent documentation and cryptic errors, but allows Scheme code to run on the Web via custom WASM without Emscripten.
- Initially misunderstood Hoot's compatibility; had to port code to use Hoot-specific functions, then realized it supports more of Guile with manual imports.
- Set up code to run on both native Guile and WASM via Hoot, with automated tests for both environments, making most code agnostic to the runtime.
- Focus has been on backend setup and fundamental physics logic, with progress including a published prototype and source code.
- Future interest includes compiling Zig + Scheme programs to the Web with Hoot, exploring this combination despite potential complexity.

Hasty Briefsbeta

#webassembly

LibreCAD in the Browser

WATaBoy: JIT-Ing Game Boy Instructions to WASM Beats a Native Interpreter

WASM on the JVM Ships Under the Bytecode Alliance

Lunatic: An Erlang-inspired runtime for WebAssembly

Wasmer: Fast, secure, lightweight containers based on WebAssembly

Scheme Is a Hoot