On Tuesday, 9 July 2024 at 20:24:14 UTC, H. S. Teoh wrote:
What are you planning to run your wasm on? If in the browser, you could just use the browser's JS math functions. The performance won't be stellar (the wasm-JS boundary is SLOW), but it'd work and you wouldn't have to write your own math functions. This is what I use in my own D/wasm project. (It'd probably still beat any hand-written WASM reimplementation of math functions that you write. Remember, wasm is interpreted, so it won't beat the browser's built-in native math functions, which in all likelihood use the CPU's hardware math instructions.)
This cleared up some fundamental misunderstandings I had, thank you. I want to use raylib and betterC to build a small game that runs on the browser. For motivation I though Wasm had many advantages over Js, but now I don't know if that is necessarily the case.
If you're planning to run your wasm in a native environment, you could probably just use the C API to interface with the host system's C library functions.
That covers native use-case. In the browser I can compile my programs to .js using emscripten/dscripten or I can just use JS API from WASM (but that is slow).
I though emscripten could target WASM directly, without conversion to .js first. And, since it supports C, I'm assuming they re-implemented C API to the OS on WASM, without the need for calling JS API or WASI. (that might not serve me still, see bellow)
I feel some fundamental misunderstanding remain, but now I have more material to research on my own, so feel free to ignore this if it is "too wrong".
- I though one could write an application with -betterC for WASM, because LDC can target it, then could build it linking to C libraries that already work on WASM and run the resulting build on the browser. That would avoid the JS-WASM bondary since everything would be WASM and I would not need to write my own abstractions. // I'm guessing one can't simply do that, and the toolchain that compiles to WASM is not so flexible/similar to compiling a normal binary. Maybe WASM does not have support for dynamic linking, for example.
- Is WASI relevant to the browser context? Or just to native apps? I though WASI API could be used on the browser, but comments and blogs about it often bring up the native context only.
I tried to reply everyone here, since I think most answers converge. Thank you all for your help :)
