WebAssembly target for Guix (Showcase)

WebAssembly target for Guix (Showcase)

[zamfofex]

Hello, Guix! I have recently worked on a WebAssembly target (for cross‐compilation) for Guix. It’s still in very early stages and thus fairly lacking, but it is enough to cross‐compile certain simple packages such as ‘lolcat’.

Maybe people might find it useful and/or interesting in some way. I have shared it here: https://git.sr.ht/~zamfofex/guix-wasm

The WebAssembly changes are applied on top of https://issues.guix.gnu.org/63088 (“Add Lc0”) because I had in my local Guix clone, and I didn’t bother to rebase.

I’d love to know what y’all might think about it!

Re: WebAssembly target for Guix (Showcase)

[Felix Lechner via Development of GNU Guix and the GNU System distribution.]

On Tue, Sep 19 2023, zamfofex wrote:

> I’d love to know what y’all might think about it!

That's super exciting! I do not plan to run GNU Guix inside a WASM
runtime (or in a browser) but I would like to experiment with WASM
versions of some of our packages.

My interest was sparked by the extraordinary claims about the upcoming
Hoot, which generates WASM from GNU Guile. The resulting binaries are
extremely small ("970 bytes") and "the Hoot-compiled WebAssembly ... is
five times faster than native Guile!" [1]

In response, I contributed packages for the "micro runtime" [2] and for
WasmEdge [3] but neither has been accepted into Guix just yet.

Kind regards
Felix

[1]
https://spritely.institute/news/scheme-to-wasm-lambdas-recursion.html
[2] https://issues.guix.gnu.org/64179
[3] https://issues.guix.gnu.org/64319

Re: WebAssembly target for Guix (Showcase)

[Csepp]

zamfofex <zamfofex@twdb.moe> writes:

> Hello, Guix! I have recently worked on a WebAssembly target (for
> cross‐compilation) for Guix. It’s still in very early stages and thus
> fairly lacking, but it is enough to cross‐compile certain simple
> packages such as ‘lolcat’.
>
> Maybe people might find it useful and/or interesting in some way. I
> have shared it here: https://git.sr.ht/~zamfofex/guix-wasm
>
> The WebAssembly changes are applied on top of
> https://issues.guix.gnu.org/63088 (“Add Lc0”) because I had in my
> local Guix clone, and I didn’t bother to rebase.
>
> I’d love to know what y’all might think about it!

Hosting services on WASM would increase security by a lot, so I'm very
excited that someone is working on this.
Also cross-compiling GUIs with Guix would be a nice way to support
developing for browsers.  Qt for instance experimentally supports
compiling for WASM.