Yep! I definitely want to build on and learn from existing patched versions of Python running in the web. Do you know what you folks do for synchronous I/O calls?
25 karma · joined May 11, 2018
Python allows you to reach in and replace the core interpreter loop, so this may be an avenue to have our own asyncify-like function pop out to JS land and restore state correctly (which we can be smart about since we are the interpreter).
It may also be possible to write something that runs Python in a webworker and communicate with it over a sharedarraybuffer, but that I'm a bit more hazy on. Pyodide has some discussion of this in https://github.com/pyodide/pyodide/issues/1219 and https://github.com/pyodide/pyodide/issues/1503.
This is definitely the hardest part of getting Python to work. Well, hardest after the hardest part of building a compiler toolchain like Emscripten :)
The demo I put in the tweet is the same code as when you type `python3` in the terminal, just running in the browser. So it is much more compatible and is mostly [1] feature complete.
[1] minus whatever libraries are likely never to be used that we ripped out
It is definitely too early for benchmarks, this is a "I got it working!" update.
The original data file with all of the standard library was a bit over 200MB. Slashing what isn't going to be run in the browser (e.g. tkinter) and zipping the standard library got it down to about 20MB. There is probably more that could be removed, and there are modules we don't need to build that we currently do. There are other things we can do like set the less frequently used modules to be loaded asynchronously.
While I doubt this will be production ready "soon", I do hope to keep working on fixing bugs and such.