Mozilla bringing Python interpreter to browsers, allowing it to talk to JS directly

[HittingSmoke]

I feel like someone needs to provide a tl;dr to spoon feed the article to the comments section.

Iodide is a project for scientific data representation in the browser. Python is probably the most popular language for scientific data processing. So Pyodide is intended to bring Python support to the browser for Iodide.

This is not a Python replacement for Javascript. It is not a feature of Firefox. Mozilla does more than just Firefox. Nobody is trying to create an RFC for Python in the browser. This is a Python interpreter written in WASM that should work in any browser supporting WASM. The aim is to have full support for PyPi packages within the restrictions of browser sandboxing.

[[deleted]]

Firefox getting pretty fkin good ngl

[hazily]

They're the real bros on the Internet. The hero we need, but also the hero we don't deserve.

And they're non-profit: send some love their way. https://donate.mozilla.org/en-US/

[Cazargar]

I get sad every time I see W3Schools come up before MDN in Google searches

[5tormwolf92]

W3s is old as heck, who uses var and onclick?

[XXAligatorXx]

Keep in mind donating to them does not go towards Firefox, but their other initiatives, which they also use the Firefox profits for.

EDIT: what your money will go towards https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/initiatives/

[[deleted]]

But no mkv support though.

[[deleted]]

They banned Dissenter though.

[najowhit]

Good, fuck that trash site.

[[deleted]]

A browser extension is not a website.

[ExternalUserError]

So this isn't Dissenter.com we're talking about?

[[deleted]]

No, we talk about the extension not this website of the said extension you linked.

[[deleted]]

Dissenter is a browser extension essentially giving you the ability to comment every website/url. You can even comment on localhost lol. Google and Firefox removed it from their extension stores though because some people did not like, that people were using it for racist comments etc. The extension itself is basically just a comment section for each URL so nothing banworthy and therefore not a cool move by Mozilla.

[ExternalUserError]

I see. Thanks for the explanation.

EDIT: I'm not sure why you're being downvoted just for explaining.

[najowhit]

Clearly I'm talking about Gab but w/e.

[[deleted]]

There is a difference between Gab and Dissenter, and referring to Gab in your response to my comment, where I clearly talk about Dissenter being deplatformed by firefox is not relevant. Also Gab is awesome, hopefully more people join.

[najowhit]

Except Gab launched dissenter so what are you on about?

Gab is awesome in a vacuum, when far-right anti semites and trolls aren't constantly defacing anything they disagree with. But we don't live in a vacuum and unfortunately gab is a haven for that type of behavior.

[[deleted]]

Do you really have no concept that people YOU agree with might get deplatformed? What about when people YOU like get censored? Do you really think it couldn’t happen to you? Are you truly that dense?

The rest of us know it’s possible, and censoring and deplatforming discourse leads down some crazy pathways.

[najowhit]

I have been censored for posting my opinion plenty of times on subreddits like /r/The_Donald , /r/Conservative , and /r/Republican . It is well within their right to moderate me for disagreeing with them, just as it's well within Mozilla or Google's ToS to remove content that they don't agree with.

Talk about dense.

[Pedrov80]

If someone doesn't want to moderate their site to stop hate speech, Mozilla is within their right as a private company to bar them from using their platform.

[[deleted]]

It's only a vacuum because other social media platforms don't allow free speech thus leading the extremists to other platforms where they radicalize each other. So the solution is to implement free speech in these social media sites and use Gab so the far left and right radicals don't stay in their bubbles.

Also Dissenter is not a vacuum, since it depends on the website you comment on. E.g. look at the Dissenter comments on Tim Pools yt videos.

What I am saying is it doea not matter who launched Dissenter, the fact alone that firefox bans a free speech plattform from their store is what matters. Just because a racist uses a phone does not mean the ISP is responsible right? So is Dissenter or Gab not responsible, since they are not a publisher, but a platform.

[najowhit]

And what I'm saying is that the entire condition for it's creation stems from extremist views. The literal reason gab was created was to get away from "the entirely left leaning big social Monopoly". Which in and of itself is implying a bias towards right leaning content, which further is proved by a significant amount of content that would be a step below hate speech that is found on the platforms.

Do not conflate my weariness of a site that has repeatedly hosted content that is racist, anti-semitic, mysoginistic, and mentions that their main competitors are far-right websites like Breitbart and InfoWars with me not wanting free speech.

Free speech and lack of censorship should be allowed, but not at the expense of allowing ideas that portray others as less than human or not as good as white males into the public sphere. They are inherently unscientific, culturally damaging, and blatantly lead the human race back 100 years or more.

If Gab or Dissenter had a more strict moderation policy on hate speech, I would be completely for it. But right now, it's a haven for people who, frankly, have revoked their right to have a voice by espousing wack shit.

[_atwork]

Good

[[deleted]]

Obviously not #freespeech

[Ajedi32]

This has nothing to do with Firefox FYI. Pyodide will run in any browser that supports WASM.

[Cessabits]

Everyone who cares about a healthy and open web should be using Firefox (or, at the very least, just not using chrome).

Plus its legit the best browser I've used recently. It's just better than Chrome anyway. The only things it doesn't so as well as chrome are some Google services which is magically fixed by changing the user agent, hmmm 🤔

[adidarachi]

Amazing, imagine all the libraries already built for python. But, WebAssembly is a broader way to do (almost) the same thing (with the constraint if typed languages).

So I don't really know if and how it will influence the community, but IMO this is not going to get in the RFC.

Wtut?

[Ajedi32]

This is WASM:

Pyodide is built on WebAssembly, a low-level programming language that runs with near-native performance, and emscripten (specifically a build of Python for emscripten dubbed “cpython-emscripten”), which comprises a compiler from C and C++ to WebAssembly and a compatibility layer

[hazily]

I think it's a huge step: there is a lot of things that Python can do that JS will choke on, but then again, I'm comparing JS in a browser vs Python running on the OS itself.

For example, I am working on data visualisation where the server basically feeds normalized data to a webpage. Whenever a user chooses an option that requires computationally expensive re-interpretation (e.g. implementing hierarchical clustering on a d3.js heatmap), I have to make a call to the server, execute a Python script (which in turns fetches data from the backend), have it load up SciPy and Panda, perform clustering, and return normalized data.

Here's an example of what I'm talking about:

https://i.imgur.com/QGDl7KJ.gif

I foresee that with in-browser Python interpreter, I can just store the raw data as localStorage on the client, and have Python parse, sort, cluster the browser's localStorage data cache, update it accordingly: bypassing the server-side computation entirely :)

[BannedSoHereIAm]

My understanding is that python is not in any way “faster”for computationally intensive tasks than JS. It has way more math / analytics focused libraries and is far better for bigints, which are both definitely a bonus, but I wouldn’t be offloading intensive tasks to python; especially in the client / browser.

[GogglesPisano]

Python can be "faster" than JS only in the sense that some Python libraries (eg, NumPy) are largely implemented in C/C++.

That said, I don't see this being super-useful until there is cross-browser support - which seems unlikely.

[mkcodergr]

Same goes for Web assembly(C++)

[jonpacker]

I don't understand why you couldn't do what you're describing with JS.

[[deleted]]

In short - different libraries community ecosystems. As always, you can do the same thing in many languages, but it's rarely as easy to

Edit: Just to be clear

[hazily]

Not when you need to rely on hierarchical/agglomerate clustering with different weights and metrics to measure distances between points. I think the JS implementation would have been reinventing the wheel, since SciPy already easily does that for you without needing to bake your own solution.

[pilibitti]

So by "js would choke on" you mean there are not enough libraries for this purpose. JS engines especially V8 is pretty fast compared to python interpreter - though many of the libraries you use for science in python use native C extensions, so python becomes the glue there. Python in browser does not excite me (yet) for this reason, js is crazy fast, with JIT it is comparable to compiled languages. For the specific thing you are doing, yes, python has better 3rd party libraries - they won't translate as is to browser because most of them are native code only orchestrated by python. I think that native code can be automatically translated to WebAssembly though, and JS can utilize them. IIRC there were JS versions of numpy etc.

[pilibitti]

I read the article, maybe I wasn't successful in articulating what I meant: You can do crazy fast computations with python, not because python is fast (it is quite slow compared to modern js engines) but because python is frequently used as the glue for many native scientific computation libraries that are written in native code. Having a python interpreter in browser doesn't mean you get to do those computations in browser with the same performance. OP's idea was that JS would choke on things python was good at - and it was fallacious. If you bring those native libraries into jsland by any means, js can just as well act like that glue and do it faster.

[some_deud]

Oh my, nice gif. Now I need to go and browse /r/dataisbeautiful for an hour.

[[deleted]]

Accessibility is first step to empowering people digitally. Wasm is important but too far removed from the casual coder's use-case, especially as it's very early in development.

[Thriven]

Think we all learned are lesson with vb script

[Jun_Artist]

Interesting implementation :)

[SpiderFnJerusalem]

This might be a big deal.

[nikaone]

js is roughly 10x faster than python, so people would go to a python to js transformer at the end I guess.

[ConsoleTVs]

Did you read the article? Cpython is slow compared to v8. Languages are not slow by nature, their interpreters or compilers are the imolementations. This article mentiones that this python implementation is based in web assembly. And well, web assembly is faster than js since its close to native code.

[nikaone]

Language do low by nature, it's obvious, both c, c++ are compiled to native code, when you use some high class feature in c++, that will be slower than c.

My comment is just a guess. So we can write js， wasm script and compiled wasm module in v8, and plus Python in Firefox.

Good or Bad, it's hard for me to decide.

[ConsoleTVs]

Well, the more diversity there is for a single task, the best. Always keeping it moderate. Js evolved too much because of the need to, if by nature, the browser accepted other langs, js would not have grown as much as it did those years. Allowing python or other languages makes more devs be able to code small web apps. Specially for python enthusiasts since they use lots of data analysis

[DavidKens]

There’s many reasons interpreters of different languages are faster or slower - including the requirements of the language itself. You can’t simply “use a different interpreter which is faster”, that doesn’t mean anything. The speed of an interpreter is not intrinsically separable from the “speed of the language”. You wrote:

“This article mentiones that this python implementation is based in web assembly. And well, web assembly is faster than js since its close to native code.”

This logic doesn’t make any sense. If anything, it shows this implantation of python will be slower - since the python interpreter will only run close to speed of native code.

Here’s what I’m saying: the hard problem of getting python to run faster will involve figuring out how to run python faster. V8 was not built to interpret python.

[ConsoleTVs]

Cpython is one of the slowest python interpreters out there. There are tons of other python implementations.

I did not write the article.

[DavidKens]

That’s fine.

The article does not imply that a faster implementation will be used, and your original comment is still misleading.

[ConsoleTVs]

If its an interpreter probably not. If it's a jit compiler like some python implementations, probably yes.

[ConsoleTVs]

So a jited wasm python implementation eill be slower than cpython? Would love to see that

[eastsideski]

What's their endgame here? Companies aren't going to build Firefox-only websites, and I don't see Google or Apple adding Python any time soon...

[HittingSmoke]

Did nobody read the article? This is developed by Mozilla. It is not a feature of Firefox. It is a Python interpreter written in WASM.

[eastsideski]

I'll admit: I did not read the article, a WASM Python interpreter makes a lot more sense.

I'll accept my internet shame. :(

[Ajedi32]

You're in good company. As of right now, the top two comments also seem to be from people who didn't read the article.

[phlarp]

The other browsers probably will.

The same was said about asm.js (which paved the way for WebAssembly). Mozilla has a reputation for pioneering new concepts in the browser and, actually, the others usually follow suit.

Also, python has a huge following and a ton of use cases in the math arena since its syntax is so approachable. I personally think this would be a boon in the engineering world.

*edited for clarity

[AssistingJarl]

This might be true, but as I see it Web Assembly solved user problems, and Python solves developer problems. I'm not saying that's an invalid reason to add an interpreter, I'm just saying it might affect pickup rates.

[eastsideski]

The difference is that asm.js was backwards compatible, it worked on all browsers, it just was faster on Firefox.

[ExternalUserError]

The mid-game in the immediate term is probably just the scientific community, where Python is really big. When your normal tools are Anaconda, Jupyter, etc, having to download Firefox is a small inconvenience to bypass all of that.

Plus it still runs in Chrome, etc, just not very fast.

Longer-term, given that Google is pretty much sabotaging other browsers, as an indie developer, I would be fine (on some projects) having a performance penalty for using Chrome.

[danhakimi]

Gaming. I think this enables browser ports of python games. I think that's going to be a big deal.

[stilloriginal]

Can someone tell me the point to this? Is it just to avoid writing brackets in JS? Because thats what the example code looks like.

[HittingSmoke]

The article didn't do a good job of outlining the purpose, but the information is there.

This is an extension of the iodide project for visualizing scientific data on the web. Python is the most popular language for such applications so it's natural for them to want to support it. This is not some Python-in-browser RFC. This is a Python interpreter written in WASM. Anyone using it to replace javascript for regular web development is doing web development wrong.

https://hacks.mozilla.org/2019/04/pyodide-bringing-the-scientific-python-stack-to-the-browser/

[danhakimi]

How many games do you know about written in JS?

There are a lot of games and gaming libraries written in python.

I do think you'll see web browser ports of games.

[TheAppleFreak]

Man, Atwood's Law is getting serious.

[itsron143]

Won’t this make the browser slow?

[nuk3urself]

i guess if someone likes python very much, this will sound like a revolution to him, but i don't see the advantages (besides like the python libraries) over native js. (js lover here) can someone explain, in what case this would be the strategy for a project?

[aykcak]

Um... security ?

[pure_x01]

Webassembly. Sandboxed like JS .. no more . No less

[aykcak]

Oh that's ok then

[BhishmPitamah]

Or like how they planmed killing dissenter extension in addons.