Proposal for porting D runtime to WebAssembly

[Steven Schveighoffer]

On 11/25/19 7:52 AM, Sebastiaan Koppe wrote:
> So it became clear to me I need to have druntime available. It will 
> allow people to use the (almost) complete set of D features and it opens 
> up some metaprogramming avenues that are closed off right now. With that 
> I will be able to create some nice DSL, in line with JSX/SwiftUI or 
> <insert-your-favorite-declarative-framework>.
> 
> There are plenty of opportunities here. It is not unfeasible to connect 
> spasm to Qt, or dlangui, and create a cross-platform UI library, 
> something like flutter.
> 
> On the other hand, I am very excited about WebAssembly in general. It is 
> certainly at the beginning of the hype curve and I suspect some very 
> exciting things will appear in the future. Some of them are already here 
> right now. For instance, you can target ARM by compiling D code to wasm 
> and then use wasmer to compile it to ARM. With D connecting itself to 
> the wasm world it exposes itself to a lot of cool things, which we 
> mostly get for free.
> 
> As an example, it is just a matter of time before a PaaS provider fully 
> embraces wasm. Instead of having docker containers you just compile to 
> wasm, which will be pretty small and can boot in (sub) milli-seconds 
> (plus they don't necessarily need a linux host kernel running and can 
> run it closer to the hypervisor.)

As someone who does web application development, all of this sounds 
awesome. I would LOVE to have a real programming language to do the 
client-side stuff.

-Steve