Drumming up some excitement 🥁… I just recorded the first episode of a new podcast series that I'm hosting: the #WasmAssembly, your monthly podcast gathering of people to geek out about all things #WebAssembly.
My first guest was no other than #Wasm OG @kripken, whom you may associate with projects like #Emscripten and, you know, WebAssembly, the language. The episode should go up mid April, watch this space!
Yes. It's WasmAssembly, a name smarter than hairdresser 💇 names à la United Hairlines.
Hey everyone, I just made something cool!
I wrote a fractal viewer in C++, compiled it to #Wasm using #Emscripten, and put it on my website (https://kalankaboom.net/).
I wrote an article on how I made it, and I would love for you to check it out and give me all the feedback you can!
Then he tried JSCL, a Common Lisp to JavaScript compiler that is implemented in Common Lisp and so it can bootstrap itself with any standard Common Lisp compiler.
I learned about a lot of Common Lisp on the Web technologies I had never heard of before, it was well worth it to read.
excited for the #WebAssembly build of #SpacestationDefense! Almost all the pieces are in the place, I've figured out how to wrangle #emscripten into cooperating. I just need the #zig folks to release async support and then I can write the necessary websocket API.
I just built and installed ECL #CommonLisp (hompage) onto my computer, and after playing around with it for only a few minutes, I am quite impressed with it!
First off, the entire installation is only 40 MB, so this is definitely one of the more compact Common Lisp implementations I have ever seen.
It emits C code, native shared libraries, native static libraries, and native executables.
It uses libffi for C interoperability.
It provides ASDF, and the ability to install packages from QuickLisp
It implements Lisp standard processes on top of Pthreads
It provides some bindings to Qt4 for GUI programming
It implements all of CLOS
All of that in just 40 MB (not including Qt, which you need to install separately). The only drawback so far is that the documentation has some gaps in it.
But I definitely want to play around with #ECL some more. The trouble is most Common Lisp packages written nowadays only support SBCL. I would like to see how much of the Common Lisp ecosystem I can actually use through ECL. I wonder if I could maybe port something like the Lem text editor over to ECL instead of building it with SBCL, but that might prove impossible.
Anyway, my overall impression right now is that I have a very lightweight but powerful Common Lisp compiler at my disposal now that can easily be embedded into any C program I want, which is very exciting!