Running Clojure in WASM with GraalVM

null

[deleted]

nzoschke

GraalVM is neat.

I used it to make a program that logs all activity happening on the Pioneer CDJs. The best reverse engineering of the Pioneer protocols is a Java project, but I wanted to write the rest of my application in Go.

GraalVM plus a GitHub action spits out native binaries that I can exec and interact with over stdio from Go.

If/when the WASM backend supports UDP networking and threads I'd love to run it as WASM instead of a binary.

- https://github.com/nzoschke/vizlink

- https://github.com/nzoschke/vizlink/blob/main/.github/workfl...

tiffanyh

> Starting from v25 GraalVM added support for WASM

GraalVM is so amazing technically, but gets so little love by HN.

sureglymop

When I tried it it was great but also not easy to use. Things become hard quickly, e.g. If your jvm code uses something like reflection.

90s_dev

I vaguely remember using it about 10 years ago for work, can't remember what for, or anything about that situation, but the one takeaway that I do remember is that it was neat and innovative, but ultimately not good enough to overthrow whatever we were using instead.

croemer

The analysis of the benchmark is wrong. Native is faster than JVM for 2 out of 4 operations. The 2-3x vs 5-12x are hence not correct.

dlachausse

> The output WASM of this simple program is 5.6MB binary, which can be pruned a bit via wasm-opt tool, just make sure that it doesn't break anything for you. Luckily when compressed (gzip, brotli, etc) the binary becomes just ~2.5MB in size.

That’s much better than I expected! Very impressive work here. It actually looks viable for certain applications.

sjrd

It's acceptable. Meanwhile 5.6MB of Wasm is about the size of the entire test suite of Scala.js. :-p

GraalVM is excellent technology, but when it comes to targeting Wasm, I believe the core language compilers will always have an edge.

rgyams

Nice, I will revisit closure to try this out

millerm

Clojure. ;)

tomjakubowski

For quite some time (maybe even still today?), ClojureScript was compiled to JS using the Google Closure Compiler. I felt sympathy for anyone who had to discuss that out loud.

sjrd

The trick is to call the latter GCC. Much less confusing. ;-)

shawn_w

Imagine the pain of talking about Clozure Common Lisp.

90s_dev

You have no idea how many times I typed clojure when I meant to type closure throughout my career. Bizarrely backwards.

zusammen

[dead]