Did you know, that Oracle open sourced part of Gra...

# webassembly

[August]

Did you know, that Oracle open sourced part of Graalvm compiler compiling to WebAssembly? src: https://github.com/oracle/graal/tree/master/web-image &

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z2SWSIThHXY▾

[Michael Paus]

Yes, but it is not really usable yet because there is no documentation and from what I was told the export of functions, which you would need to make some library usable in Wasm code, is not yet supported. However, I already tested my example code in a main program on all major browsers with it and it worked. The code generation already seems to be quite solid. So let’s wait for the official announcement with docs and export support.

[sdeleuze]

Indeed, see https://www.linkedin.com/posts/deleuze_you-may-have-missed-it-but-the-graalvm-team-activity-7322241273199755264-lkNm where I share some related thoughts.

[Michael Paus]

By the way, this functionality is not really new. You could achieve the same already for some time via TeaVM and CheerpJ. I am just preparing to publish a demo where I show how that works.

[sdeleuze]

Yeah, but the GraalVM effort has IMO much more potential, at least for the use cases I am interested in.

I don’t think Cheerpj is open source while Web Image is, and unlike TeaVM they have the team size and the legal clearance to bring it pretty far.

But it is still pretty new and incomplete so let see how far they go.

[Michael Paus]

Yes, I agree. The potential is great and I am looking forward to a more complete release.
CheerpJ has a free plan:
✔️ Unlimited access to CheerpJ Core
✔️ For individuals and FOSS projects
✔️ Commercial use allowed

[Anonymike]

CheerpJ and others are great options, but those kinds of freemium structures for sensitive tools in the chain create a lot of dependency problems for us. We get no guarantee they won't change to some ridiculous plan after building software that has to last for a decade on them. This is something Oracle has done time and again, so we're super careful what we build on at this point.

[Michael Paus]

Yes, but that’s basically true for any software. I am suffering from such a problem right now because some OSS is just reluctant to update.