Nice. Maybe a pie in the sky but considering how prevalent python is in machine learning, how likely is it that at some point most ML frameworks written in python become executable on a web browser through WASM?
At that time, I think our blockers were Apache Arrow, Parquet readers, and startup time. There were active issues on all three. The GPU & multicore thing is a different story.as that is more about Google & Apple than WASM wrt browsers, and I'd be curious about the CUDA story serverside. We didn't research the equivalent of volume mounts and shmem for fast read-only data imports.
For Louie.AI, we ended up continuing with serverside & container-based sandboxing (containers w libseccomp, nsjail, disabled networking, ...).
Hard to motivate wasm in the server for general pydata sandboxing in 2024 given startup times, slowdowns, devices, etc: most of our users who want the extra protection would also rather just self-host, decreasing the threat model. Maybe look again in 2025? It's still a good direction, just not there yet.
As a browser option, or using with some more limited cloud FaaS use cases, still potentially interesting for us, and we will keep tracking.
Python is quite slow, and handles parallelization very badly. This is not very important for data loading and conditioning tasks, which would benefit little from parallelization, but it is critical for inference.
The question is do the web browsers and WebAssembly have enough RAM to do any meaningful machine learning work.
Which have better process isolation; containers or Chrome's app sandbox at pwn2own how do I know what is running in a WASM browser tab?
JupyterLite, datasette-lite, and the Pyodide plugin for vscode.dev ship with Pyodide's WASM compilation of CPython and SciPy Stack / PyData tools.
`%pip install -q mendeley` in a notebook opened with the Pyodide Jupyter kernel works by calling `await micropip.install(["mendeley"])` IIRC.
picomamba installs conda packages from emscripten-forge, which is like conda-forge: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33892076#33916270 :
> FWIU Service Workers and Task Workers and Web Locks are the browser APIs available for concurrency in browsers
sqlite-wasm, sqlite-wasm-http, duckdb-wasm, (edit) postgresql WASM / pglite ; WhatTheDuck, pretzelai ; lancedb/lance is faster than pandas with dtype_backend="arrow" and has a vector index
"SQLite Wasm in the browser backed by the Origin Private File System" (2023) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34352935#34366429
"WebGPU is now available on Android" (2024) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39046787
"WebNN: Web Neural Network API" https://www.w3.org/TR/webnn/ : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36159049
"The best WebAssembly runtime may be no runtime" (2024) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38609105
(Edit) emscripten-forge packages are built for the wasm32-unknown-emscripten build target, but wasm32-wasi is what is now supported by cpython (and pypi?) https://www.google.com/search?q=wasm32-wasi+conda-forge
But with the right tool chain, you already can do this. You can use Pyodide to embed a Python interpreter in WASM, and if you set things up correctly you should be able to make the underlying C/FORTRAN/whatever extensions target WASM also and link them up.
TFA is compiling a subset of actual raw Python to WASM (no extension). To be honest, I think applications for this are pretty niche. I don't think Python is a super ergonomic language once you remove all the dynamicity to allow it to compile down. But maybe someone can prove me wrong.
One of the issues you'll run into is that Pyodide only works by default with packages that have pure Python wheels available. The team has developed support for some libraries with C dependencies (like scikit-learn, I believe), but frameworks like PyTorch are particularly thorny (see this issue: https://github.com/pyodide/pyodide/issues/1625 )
We ended up rolling out a new version of our Python visualizations that runs off-browser, in order to support enough libraries/get the performance we need: https://www.comet.com/docs/v2/guides/comet-ui/experiment-man...