Comment by buggery
Comment by buggery 2 days ago
Interesting technical achievement but what would this be used for in practical terms?
Comment by buggery 2 days ago
Interesting technical achievement but what would this be used for in practical terms?
For one, it demonstrates how far the ghc wasm backend has come, in that such a large system as ghc itself can now run in wasm
It would be more plausibly practical if GHC could now target wasm, but this announcement is actually about being able to run the compiler itself in the browser.
Loading 50mb of WASM is a big tradeoff just to run code on a website.
For comparison: the homepage of cnn.com right now is 33.37MB on my machine. 16.82MB of which is JavaScript.
I think the immediate and obvious case would be educational materials. Other than that, technical achievements need not always be practical to be cool :)
That’s one of the primary reasons we built the tooling for Q# to run in the browser (by writing in Rust and compiling to wasm). The “try with copilot” experience [1] and the “katas” for learning [2] all have a full language service and runtime in the browser.
I don't have the same impression, but https://github.com/PostgREST/postgrest and https://github.com/koalaman/shellcheck are some popular ones that may be useful to hn'ers.
And https://github.com/mchav/dataframe?tab=readme-ov-file#datafr... is a library/framework that has had quite some velocity lately
From "WebR – R in the Browser" (2025 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44999706 :
> jupyterlite-xeus builds jupyterlite, Jupyter xeus kernels, and the specified dependencies to WASM with packages from conda-forge or emscripten-forge.
jupyterlite/xeus https://github.com/jupyterlite/xeus
There may be an easy way to wrap GHC with jupyterlite/xeus, with Haskell's lazy evaluation; xeus-haskell or xeus-ghc?
I will give a lecture about Haskell next week and might use this website for demonstration.