This is a wrapper around a c++ codebase compiled with emscripten, so "pure" in the title doesn't really make sense.
I can see where you're coming from, but I've never used or heard anyone in the web world use "pure" to mean only "written entirely in Javascript without transpilation or other tools."
If it hits the parts of "pure JS" that most people care about:
- it's running entirely in Javascript.
- it has no native dependencies.
- it can run entirely clientside.
- it can be embedded in a normal web page.
then I think most people will be fine with using "pure" to describe it.
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I wouldn't even have that many quibbles with their phrasing even if they were compiling to WASM. Sure, at that point it wouldn't be running as pure javascript, but it would still hit 3 of the 4 points above.
That’s exactly what “pure” means - “pure rust”, “pure go”, etc. IMO you can’t say the heart of all the work is a c++ lib and call it a “pure JS” anything.
More accurately / correctly / usefully would be calling it “JS wrapper over a c++ library cross compiled to JS”. Or maybe “All JS at runtime” or some other qualifier.
Want to see how to cross-compile a non-trivial c++ lib? Check out here!
Want to see a great JS wrapper library where we had to make cross-language & cross memory-management API decisions? Check this out!
But - want to read some awesome high performance image processing algorithms in JS? Not this.
I'm not sure where the line here is supposed to be drawn, but I don't personally think looking at asm.js code is significantly harder than looking at something like compiled Typescript, and certainly it's not any harder than looking at minified Javascript. If I'm going to be debugging code, they're both going to be annoying to look at. We're quibbling over definitions so I'm not going to say that you're wrong, "pure" can mean whatever you want it to mean. I'm just saying that most JS devs I know consider (for example) JSX code to still be pure Javascript when it's compiled.
It seems a little odd to me to look at something where every single line of code is Javascript, being run entirely in a Javascript interpreter, and say that isn't actually completely real Javascript, but if the programming circles you frequent are different and think about this differently, :shrug: more power to you.
> But - want to read some awesome high performance image processing algorithms in JS? Not this.
I also wouldn't necessarily assume that every Open Source program written in only JS without compilation is going to be well suited for reading or learning from. But again, sort of splitting straws here -- my only concern is that you're probably going to be disappointed a lot if you equate "pure Javascript" with "readable".
That being said perhaps a poll is needed to find out what most people think.
The only place I've seen "pure JS" used in the JS world is differentiating e.g. a Postgres client implementation that does or doesn't depend on the specific version & configuration of libpq you have on your current system. That's about runtime deps, not about source language.
I mean, if someone compiles a Markdown document and sticks the result on their website, do you say, "this isn't HTML"? People are free to use words however they want I guess, but I don't understand the perspective where the way a project was written suddenly means that the compiled result isn't Javascript -- it feels like it's taking the word "pure" in a metaphysical direction that I just don't really grok.
I'll concede though that if they're targeting WASM it's not technically pure Javascript, but it still feels a bit to me like splitting hairs since it's always been explained to me that WASM and the Javascript runtime under the hood have a lot of overlap.
https://github.com/WebAssembly/binaryen#wasm2js
The emcc flag -sWASM=0 disables the wasm final output and emits JS instead.
(But as already mentioned, JS is still supported today, using wasm2js.)