rust language support

[mash-graz]

i'm just curious, if someone already has started to develop support for the rust language for iodide?

for jupyter there is evcxr available to evaluate little rust fragments in a notebook like manner. using its core library in iodide/pyodide would IMHO make a lot of sense, because rust and its WASM retated features are already used for the developement of this software. it would also help to make the extensibility and self-documetation of iodide more powerful. better integration and support for rust- resp. WASM-based components like plotters could significantly improve the performance of iodide in comparison to traditional java script based approaches.

[wlach]

This would be interesting, I guess the main question would be how to compile rust to webassembly should that it could be executed in the browser. There's two options here:

1. Porting emscripten itself to webassembly (sounds really hard) and compile rust inside the brwoser
2. Having a server-side process for accepting code fragments and returning webassembly as a response (also hard, but probably far more tractable)

If you just wanted to run a specific WASM component inside Iodide, that's far easier: the process should be basically the same as it is for any other JavaScript library. You can either import it directly inside the notebook or write a language plugin to make that more convenient. The vegaLite plugin that I've been experimenting with would be an example of the latter:

https://definitely-staging.iodide.io/notebooks/173/

[mash-graz]

yes -- you are right! it doesn't look like an easy task to prepare the necessary tools as web/wasi components. all the practical implementaions, which try to solve similar tasks (evcxr, rust-playground and webassembly studio) actually handle it in a client-server manner by utilizing native tools on the host side. but eliminating this requirement is IMHO exactly the most fascinating feature of your software.

i just wrote a question concerning this topic on the relative vivid reddit rust board. maybe someone else can give us a hint, how to solve this desire.

but thanks for your kind reply