Hacker News Reader

Comment by giancarlostoro | Hacker News Reader

Will you guys ever just do Python -> WASM? I think the next "Big break" for front-end web dev is literally this. I've been using Microsoft's Blazor (C#) which is this, with a mix of back-end and front-end capabilities, and I just don't see any reason to ever use JS or React again.

View on HN

This is definitely something we've discussed and I think Python -> WASM is an exciting innovation. Right now, there's some challenges with how large of a WASM binary a typical Python app will compile to (e.g. bundling the std lib) and the initialization time [1].

I think supporting Python -> WASM could be one of the options we support, but there's probably always a need to support Python on the server, simply due to the ecosystem (e.g. dependencies) that's around it.

[1] https://pyodide.org/en/stable/project/roadmap.html#reducing-...

I've thought about trying to support something along the lines of Django Templates -> WASM, but the one interesting thing that Blazor does is it also renders the templates on the back-end for those who don't necessarily want to render it on the browser. I think you'd have to consider some sort of templating language, that intermixes nicely with Python. If I remember correctly, Mako was a templating library I used for a project ages back, they focused on letting you for the most part just use standard python for the scripting side of the template engine.

So if I had the time and energy, I'd spend my time looking at something like Mako, maybe even forking it, and making it minimal enough to build into WASM. I assume you mainly want to shove a templating library into WASM and not too much more. The rest you could offload to a smaller JS library your WASM can interface through.

I could be talking off my other end, but this is all spit balling from various things I've read, I'm by no means a total expert.

As we mentioned Flet here - it's been able to build web apps running completely in the web browser (Flutter + Pyodide). Here are a few examples: https://flet.dev/gallery - most of those apps there are client-side except "Controls gallery" and "Chat" which are server-side.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com