One of the aspects I find tremendously exciting about Wasm is not just the portability, security, performance, etc. but the fact that you can do this with your language of choice. Lowering the barrier to adoption without hindering some of the advanced use cases tends to work well to get developers onboard ...
It's not quite as open as the language of your choice. There are a handful of popular languages available, Rust, C, C++ and a number of fringe languages like Zig, AssemblyScript, etc. You can run something like Python but it's a bit misleading because you're compiling the entire runtime to WebAssembly similar to how CheerpJ runs Java or Blazor runs .NET
Python performance on wasm is going to be abysmal because you're essentially running a VM inside a VM. Other languages like rust can compile directly to wasm. Until Python can do the same it will be a second or third class citizen in wasm.
Put another way, you could make one of those tier charts for WASM tooling, and if rust is in S tier, python is like C or D tier.
You are not running a VM inside a VM. You are compiling to another target and modern Wasm runtimes allow AOT and JIT so performance is close to native while preserving all the other goodness of Wasm (sandbox, portability to 'weird' environments like browsers and IoT, etc)
Rust is not an interpreted language like Python. Your comment would make sense if Python code could be compiled into x86 or ARM assembly in the first place.
> Your comment would make sense if Python code could be compiled into x86 or ARM assembly in the first place.
It can actually be compiled (or transpiled) into C code [1] with few limitations, so I can't see why not. It still requires libpython but it should be better than porting the whole interpreter to webassembly.
This is exactly what I needed. Context is I am trying to incorporate different scripting language in our rust app so I tried RustPython and QuickJS. Its been a pain so far and it adds a lot of time to our compilation so I love the idea of being able to load a wasm python but I was missing this script to host communication part.
This is a work in progress effort. I saw different people working on this direction, so you can use Python libraries that includes native extensions in Wasm.
Not sure if you’re just trying to advertise your project, but I wouldn’t use Pyodide in that case. I’d personally rather use the tool linked in the OP article for something like an OS in the browser
In fact it seems that WASI build environment is not supporting asynchronous syscalls. I think it will be needed for integrating Python apps in a web browser
The Python builds from the WebAssembly language runtimes [0] project target the WebAssembly System Interfaces (WASI) [1]. It allows the Python interpreter to interact with resources like the filesystem.
Many server-side Wasm runtimes supports WASI out of the box. For the browser, you need to provide a polyfill to emulate these resources like the one provided by the WASI team [2].
Regarding SQLite, these builds include libsqlite so you should be able to use it :)
