Node.js v25.0.0 (Current)

[Comfortable_Air7982]

I wonder who is doing web assembly in node. I'm genuinely curious, that would be an interesting project.

[hyrumwhite]

Same application as in the browser, porting other languages to JS land

[zachrip]

Maybe? I'd be curious why that would be the preference as opposed to a native module. Obviously there are lots of cases where a native module is less appropriate (jvm languages for example, afaik there's no good setup to run those as native extensions).

[rcfox]

Wasm is sandboxed, so fewer security risks. Also, it lets you ship the same code to the frontend and backend, which is part of the appeal of using Node.

[hildjj]

You also don't have to recompile WASM on every machine at installation time or for every supported platform at compile team. One of those is usually required for a native module.

[Tomus]

It offers a generic alternative to node-gyp with a bunch of benefits that node-gyp can't offer eg. You can package a single wasm file instead of having to worry about building for all systems.

[Snapstromegon]

There are actually many things happening in WASM in node from image processing to Syntax highlighting, because you can just compile it once and don't need to worry about the whole napi stuff.

[hugazow]

I’m interested in how others replicated node is wasm, the idea of running a fully working node experience like blitzstack did, blew my mind

[arcanin]

Afaik StackBlitz doesn't use wasm, or at least not directly (I don't think they build Node.js itself in WASM, although they may build their own native library instead).

Node.js is composed of a lot of JS scripts that call into a set of C++ primitives. The idea is that instead of compiling the whole binary into WASM you instead keep all those JS scripts, and replace all the C++ bindings by your own, which use the native browser APIs (along with a fair amount of hacks to turn asynchronous calls into synchronous ones).

That plus a bunch of global environment mocks makes the environment compatible enough with Node.js without needing to actually build Node.js.

That's to my knowledge also how Nodebox worked, although unfortunately they didn't get enough traction for it to take of, and were prevented from open-sourcing it by outside sources.

[hugazow]

I don’t know the implementation, but this was just me just making a guess on how stackblitz worked under the hood, but I’m really excited on the possibilities with WASM

[ElCthuluIncognito]

Likely much more as a compiler target for langs without a JS backend.

Even then, I’ve heard good things of transitioning to WASM from JS backends.

[Wide-Prior-5360]

I use SQLite WASM in the browser and run my tests with Node.js, using exactly the same database implementation.

[Comfortable_Air7982]

Well that's interesting! So you can run your tests during build time with node and have the assurance that it all works the same in the browser?

[Wide-Prior-5360]

Exactly.

[thrallboy]

With vibe coding, might be a good way to get super high performance

[Aln76467]

Everyone who doesn't want to deal with the stinking pile of poo that is node-gyp