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Comment by zackoverflow | Hacker News Reader

This is a little experiment demonstrating the capabilities of the goscript project (https://github.com/oxfeeefeee/goscript) by compiling it to wasm.

Here's the source code (https://github.com/zackradisic/go-playground-wasm) if you would like to look at it and do something similar with your own projects.

I'm really excited for the future of goscript, Go is a great candidate for a scripting language thanks to its minimalistic design choices.

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Got to admit, I think "Rewrite it in Rust" has gone too far this time.

> Goscript > A script language like Python or Lua written in Rust, with exactly the same syntax as Go's.

Strange things are afoot at the Circle K.

Thanks. I've never seen Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure and this comment lead me down a great little Internet rabbit hole

Stop at the first movie, both the sequels are totally heinous.

I enjoyed the newest one, but probably because it was dumb and nostalgic and I hadn't seen the original in twenty years.

What GC is used in goscript? The upstream one, a Rust GC<> one, maybe the mini one from TinyGo, or something else custom?

I poked around earlier and found this file: https://github.com/oxfeeefeee/goscript/blob/master/vm/src/gc...

Perhaps someone can shed more light on how exactly it works

From looking at it for like 20 seconds (I ain't no serious rustacean, so forgive if I'm wrong) I think they're using just a growable pool (as vectors) of each fundamental type in the Go language, then having each instance of each fundamental type be boxed in a Rc (reference counted) type so that they can count all references to each instance of each fundamental type.I believe that this can be used to get simple reference counting "for free" via the borrow checker of Rust. Probably many downsides, and apparently they don't yet implement GC of channels, but it seems like a nice straightforward way to get a script-ing/purely interpreted implementation of a language off the ground.

The Rc module with the impl - https://doc.rust-lang.org/alloc/rc/

Further docs on Rc- https://doc.rust-lang.org/book/ch15-04-rc.html

How come this is so fast? I feel like the processing faster than I would get on an native compiled and run program. Are there any benchmarks?

Speculation here, but I think WASM lends itself very well to JIT compilation, and V8 has one of the best compiler teams in the world.

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