Being reading a lot about betterC, but still have some questions

[kiboshimo]

On Tuesday, 9 July 2024 at 20:24:14 UTC, H. S. Teoh wrote:
> What are you planning to run your wasm on?  If in the browser, 
> you could just use the browser's JS math functions.  The 
> performance won't be stellar (the wasm-JS boundary is SLOW), 
> but it'd work and you wouldn't have to write your own math 
> functions.  This is what I use in my own D/wasm project.  (It'd 
> probably still beat any hand-written WASM reimplementation of 
> math functions that you write.  Remember, wasm is interpreted, 
> so it won't beat the browser's built-in native math functions, 
> which in all likelihood use the CPU's hardware math 
> instructions.)

This cleared up some fundamental misunderstandings I had, thank 
you. I want to use raylib and betterC to build a small game that 
runs on the browser. For motivation I though Wasm had many 
advantages over Js, but now I don't know if that is necessarily 
the case.

> If you're planning to run your wasm in a native environment, 
> you could probably just use the C API to interface with the 
> host system's C library functions.

That covers native use-case. In the browser I can compile my 
programs to .js using emscripten/dscripten or I can just use JS 
API from WASM (but that is slow).

I though emscripten could target WASM directly, without 
conversion to .js first. And, since it supports C, I'm assuming 
they re-implemented C API to the OS on WASM, without the need for 
calling JS API or WASI. (that might not serve me still, see 
bellow)

I feel some fundamental misunderstanding remain, but now I have 
more material to research on my own, so feel free to ignore this 
if it is "too wrong".

- I though one could write an application with -betterC for WASM, 
because LDC can target it, then could build it linking to C 
libraries that already work on WASM and run the resulting build 
on the browser. That would avoid the JS-WASM bondary since 
everything would be WASM and I would not need to write my own 
abstractions.
// I'm guessing one can't simply do that, and the toolchain that 
compiles to WASM is not so flexible/similar to compiling a normal 
binary. Maybe WASM does not have support for dynamic linking, for 
example.

- Is WASI relevant to the browser context? Or just to native 
apps? I though WASI API could be used on the browser, but 
comments and blogs about it often bring up the native context 
only.

I tried to reply everyone here, since I think most answers 
converge. Thank you all for your help :)