11mo ago

Looking for a language, that can easily compile to WASM

Originally, I was going to use D, but its current WASM guideline is buried under a lot of Discord threads, all while people are lazy to touch the wiki. I need to test stuff with WASM (use for scripting in applications, not browsers).

Please NO RUST!!! While I see why functional programming is useful (I even use wasmtime as my WASM engine, which is developed in Rust), but is horribly counterproductive for game development, especially if it's opt out like in Rust.

EDIT: In the meanwhile, I've found AssemblyScript, which seems to be good for my usecase.

25 comments

Rust isn’t strictly functional? Do you mean you’d like a language with garbage collection?
- It's not a functional language at all, even if it borrows ideas from FP languages. It's an imperative language through and through.
  
  "It's not a functional language at all even though it has lots of functional language features"
  What? Rust is really quite a functional language in style, even if can easily support an imperative style too.
  What exactly do you think makes something a functional language? Apart from currying I can't think of any typical FP features it is missing.
- Are there benefits in not having a GC in WASM?
  Also are there mainstream memory safe languages without a borrow checker? There’s some experimental ones out there.
I find Zig a language wuth very good WASM support out of the box and it is mostly imperative in nature.
It is currently pre 1.0 and has some rough edges.
You can use Go and compile with TinyGo.
- The downside of that is that you have to code in Go
  
  That is a downside, yes...
- I wish the "standard" Go's WASM support was better.
Rust?
I haven't tried it, and it seems to be in alpha, but... Kotlin?
I haven't done too much work with WASM myself, but when I did, the only languages I saw recommended were Rust, C++, or TinyGo. From what I've heard, Rust and C++ are smoother than TinyGo. Garbage collected languages usually aren't great choices for compiling to wasm because wasm doesn't have any native garbage collection support. That limits your selection down a lot.
But another option you may want to consider is Nim. As I understand, it compiles to C, so any C->Wasm compiler should theoretically work for you as well. I did a quick search and wasn't able to find any great resources on how to do this, but you might get a bit more lucky. Good luck!
I have not used this but Moonbit "looks" good https://www.moonbitlang.com/
Swift could be a good choice.
- When is Swift ever a good choice?... JK :)
Ive done C++ and C# before. Both work but it still feels very experimental in browser support. Ive put lisp in the browser through wasm with C++. Its was a fun novelty.
https://github.com/cloudflare/cobweb https://github.com/appcypher/awesome-wasm-langs
Scala-js is working on it - as its compiler design may facilitate this.
I haven't yet tried (on todo list) and am not an expert, but bookmarked in passing:
recent github implementation, some history, following older discussion
- Scala-js is becoming my go to scala backend. I did not know there was a wasm feature coming. Will try
What are you building, it depends a bit on your usecase
Otherwise c# Blazor compiles to WASM
Late here, but if you want the easy route then there is always Unity (C#) if it fits for your use case in game dev and the license isn't a problem for you.

25 comments