[abuldauskas]

I wrote/maintain Walt. This question comes up a bunch.

The two projects are really similar no doubt. I can't speak for AssemblyScript, but my own motivation was simple. I wanted to learn WebAssembly and I wanted an accessible platform to do so with. At the time this wasn't really possible, tools like emscripten took forever to set up and were clunky to use. Plus I knew C already, I wanted to learn WebAssembly instead.

So where Walt is an attempt to write WebAssembly with a familiar syntax, AssemblyScript is an attempt to compile TypeScript to WebAssembly. To do so AssemblyScript comes with many more niceties/features out of the box IIRC, like optional(?) GC for example. Walt makes no such attempts and takes a more DIY approach.

Walt also has language extensions, via customizable syntax and compiler pipeline, where AssemblyScript is a TypeScript compiler more or less. My hope is that this allows for a babel-like situation for WebAssembly in the future via the tooling setup for Walt. I don't think this is a goal of AssemblyScript.

[danShumway]

> Walt also has language extensions

IMO this is a good decision. I much prefer a platform with a small API than I can personally extend over a large platform that has specific customization options or lots of extra features that all just "kind of" solve whatever problem I have.

Reading this makes me more interested in the project than I was before.

One quick recommendation, it was kind of hard to find the documentation for the Webpack free compiler (https://www.npmjs.com/package/walt-compiler). This is purely anecdotal, but I suspect that at least some of the people who are turned on by having a low-level library that doesn't include Typescript niceties will be turned off by seeing the quick-start immediately say to install Webpack. Might be a good idea to have the compiler documentation inside the wiki alongside the quick-start?

[konaraddio]

> The whole point of WebAssembly was to find some way to get away from JavaScript

The goal is to "Define a portable, size- and load-time-efficient binary format to serve as a compilation target which can be compiled to execute at native speed by taking advantage of common hardware capabilities...."[0].

[0] https://webassembly.org/docs/high-level-goals/

[kristofferR]

What a weird argument. C is not "better" than Javascript, it is vastly worse for the vast majority of current Javascript uses - where raw performance is a less important consideration than development time.

Javascript is far from perfect, but it has improved by leaps and bounds the last few years. WebAssembly is great, but a variant of Javascript or other high-level languages will continue to dominate web development, not C. People aren't going to "escape" from Javascript to C, except certain niches where performance is vital.

[abuldauskas]

Escaping JavaScript is not a perspective shared by all (most?), though.

It's has been a weird and interesting project, but that's not really a bad thing is it.