Recommendations when publishing a WASM library

[jitl]

Wow, this is a great resource! I’ve been dealing with a lot of these issues with a JS sandbox library I’m building quickjs-emecripten. I want to offer a ton of different build variants of my core WASM file. Here’s what I tried: https://github.com/justjake/quickjs-emscripten/blob/master/t...

This approach works great for NodeJS, but once I ran a test bundle I found that Webpack (and bundlephobia) included all the base64 “release” variants instead of lazy-loading the import statements. Bummer. I assumed this because Typescript on its own compiled import to Promise.resolve(require(…)), so it’s good to know that most bundlers will STILL get this wrong even if I’m emitting ES6 module import syntax. Yikes! I need to bite the bullet and start using Rollup to emit a slew of separate entry points. Oy veh.

Anyways A+++ would read again. This will save me 4-5 days of work stubbing my toe on bundlers and build system which is the Least Fun part of JS work.

[Shadonototra]

Security wise, it is not a good idea to consume WASM libraries "as is", ask for the source, read it, and compile it yourself

You don't want to be in a position to ship code to production with binary code that could potentially be harmful

Off topic: Please don't mess up the way my browser scroll pages, it is infuriating

[aseipp]

In the case of NPM consumers of wasm libraries, it often isn't realistic option "as-is", since they won't have the toolchain needed to build the code. Rust is a lot more well oiled than C/C++ in this regard but it's a bit of a hassle to line things up and keep things reliable and reproducible. (Good luck if the blob is not only C/C++ but uses 3rd party dependencies on top of that, which often require even more hurdles). If you don't use the pre-built blob you'll often have to 'insert' it otherwise into the library, somehow, which is its own chore. So it's all a bit chicken and egg at some level. Now, it's not like a lot of these packages ever followed best practices in this regard (I'm reminded of many Ruby, Python, JS packages that love to ship random .so files, and often do it incorrectly) but it is what it is.

That said I generally agree with the premise, and even with sandboxing you should vet dependencies like these where appropriate if you can. A good example of this is something like an image decoder versus a database library (both of these being real scenarios; e.g. using a pure-Rust implementation of some SQL protocol.) The first one I probably wouldn't worry too about much, you're just giving it pixels in and getting pixels out. But the second one is likely worth a bit of scrutiny since it interfaces directly with a sensitive component.

[dgb23]

Can you elaborate on that? From what I know, WASM is a safe, rather abstract bytecode format and has far less API capabilites as JS has (which is why you need to call it from JS to affect the browser).

[modeless]

I really hate that base64 is the best option for embedding inline assets in HTML/JS files. Have there been any proposals to add real heredoc support to HTML/JS? With the ability to choose delimiters and support for unrestricted binary data?

[kylebarron]

Looks to be a great resource. I've been working on a WASM implementation of reading and writing Apache Parquet [0] and it's been difficult being new to WASM to find the best way of distributing the WASM that works on Node and through bundlers like Webpack.

[0]: https://github.com/kylebarron/parquet-wasm

[westurner]

conda: "Adding a WebAssembly platform" https://github.com/conda/conda/issues/7619

  pyodide.loadPackage("numpy");
 
  pyodide.loadPackage("https://foo/bar/numpy.js");
  

  #  import micropip
 
 micropip.install('https://example.com/files/snowballstemmer-2.0.0-py2.py3-none-any.whl')

"Creating a Pyodide package" > "2. Creating the meta.yaml file" https://pyodide.org/en/stable/development/new-packages.html#...

conda-forge: "WASM as a supported architecture" https://github.com/conda-forge/conda-forge.github.io/issues/...

[kansface]

Does anyone have practical experience running WASM in long running processes on node, as compared to something like Neon? Writing C in TS doesn't look particularly appealing to me, but node extensions bring their own set of problems.

[whb07]

Write it in Rust.