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Comment by PaulBGD_ | Hacker News Reader

What's the difference between this and something like AssemblyScript?: https://github.com/AssemblyScript/assemblyscript

EDIT: I see that this project actually existed slightly before AssemblyScript. Still seems like two very similar projects.

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I wrote/maintain Walt. This question comes up a bunch.

The two projects are really similar no doubt. I can't speak for AssemblyScript, but my own motivation was simple. I wanted to learn WebAssembly and I wanted an accessible platform to do so with. At the time this wasn't really possible, tools like emscripten took forever to set up and were clunky to use. Plus I knew C already, I wanted to learn WebAssembly instead.

So where Walt is an attempt to write WebAssembly with a familiar syntax, AssemblyScript is an attempt to compile TypeScript to WebAssembly. To do so AssemblyScript comes with many more niceties/features out of the box IIRC, like optional(?) GC for example. Walt makes no such attempts and takes a more DIY approach.

Walt also has language extensions, via customizable syntax and compiler pipeline, where AssemblyScript is a TypeScript compiler more or less. My hope is that this allows for a babel-like situation for WebAssembly in the future via the tooling setup for Walt. I don't think this is a goal of AssemblyScript.

> Walt also has language extensions

IMO this is a good decision. I much prefer a platform with a small API than I can personally extend over a large platform that has specific customization options or lots of extra features that all just "kind of" solve whatever problem I have.

Reading this makes me more interested in the project than I was before.

One quick recommendation, it was kind of hard to find the documentation for the Webpack free compiler (https://www.npmjs.com/package/walt-compiler). This is purely anecdotal, but I suspect that at least some of the people who are turned on by having a low-level library that doesn't include Typescript niceties will be turned off by seeing the quick-start immediately say to install Webpack. Might be a good idea to have the compiler documentation inside the wiki alongside the quick-start?

From a quick glance, it looks like AssemblyScript compiles TypeScript, whereas Walt uses its own dialect of JS with WebAssembly types.

A quick look at a sample .assembly file [0], make it look like a very different language from TypeScript.

That said, the familiar tooling, editor support, are wins over other WASM options.

[0] https://github.com/AssemblyScript/assemblyscript/blob/master...

I help out every once and a while on the AssemblyScript team with like issues, docs, and things. And made wasmboy, which uses AssemblyScript: https://github.com/torch2424/wasmBoy

But that being said, usually when people are interested in the language, we usually direct them to the "n-body" example: https://github.com/AssemblyScript/assemblyscript/blob/master... . Which kind of looks more typescript-y :)

Also, just to stay on topic, I think walt is awesome. Stoked to see so many projects coming up with a "Wasm for JS devs" approach/story.

Apart from the explicit number types (`i32` instead of `number`, etc.) it looks like standard typescript. What looks different to you?

Incredibly, the segment below is valid TypeScript.

    @inline
    function rot(x: u32, y: u32, v: u32): void {
      var a = max<i32>((v >>> 24) - BIT_ROT, 0);
      set(x, y, (a << 24) | (v & 0x00ffffff));
    }

You must be working on a different set of problems than me to be able to identify this as vanilla TypeScript.

Not given the context of a file extension, I would forgive anyone for mistaking this to be some kind of low level driver code and be confused on source language.

It is so impressive that this is valid TS though!

[edit: code formatting]

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