Are there any active efforts underway to port BEAM to WASM? If not, what is the most appropriate forum to advocate for this to happen?
As a web developer wanting to “get into” Elixir (or even Erlang), this would be one way to use Elixir as part of my everyday development efforts without requiring conversion of the server-side runtime (although it would also help to advocate for that change too).
I wish Elixir could become a mainstream choice for client-side application programming.
The 1.11 release of Go has experimental support for WebAssembly (which of course uses it own GC).
I think dockyard announced at Elixir Conf that they were going to invest in taking the BEAM to WASM. That’s my assumption based on this tweet.
https://twitter.com/bernheisel/status/1037727264614445056
Someone at dockyard or at the conference want to elaborate on what was said?
Yes. DockYard is hiring someone to tackle this effort by first seeing if it’s possible and then implement it. Brian Cardarella (CEO of DockYard) said that you shouldn’t wait for it since it will be a multi-year effort.
I made a brief attempt at it but I got inundated with compile errors that look difficult to tackle without solid C experience. For anyone who wants to try, here’s the basics of how I got started. You’ll need emsdk installed and activated first:
# Clone Erlang repo
git clone https://github.com/erlang/otp.git
cd otp
git checkout OTP-21.0.9
# Some of the build stuff references the environment variable $ERL_TOP
export ERL_TOP=`pwd`
# Start with some autoconf stuff for the Erlang RunTime System (erts). Though it may not
# actually make a difference here, I'm prefixing these commands with `emconfigure` command
# to make sure that emscripten's headers are used instead of the default system headers
cd erts
emconfigure autoheader
emconfigure autoconf
# Back in the root, configure and compile. The flag --enable-bootstrap-only causes only the
# core runtime system to be compiled
cd ..
emconfigure autoconf
emconfigure ./configure --enable-bootstrap-only
emmake make
At this point, be prepared for a mountain of compiler errors. The exact errors differ when running it on Mac vs Ubuntu. Many of them occur in parts of the code that can be disabled with preprocessor defines, so it’s possible that the right set of defines could get it to work.
There’s a section of the Erlang docs that describes cross-compilation, but I didn’t find anything I knew how to make use of. To anyone at Dockyard or elsewhere giving this a whirl, good luck, and please let us know how it’s going!
GitHub - jamen/elixir-wasm: Encoding the WASM binary format. · GitHub it’s already there, it doesn’t translate Elixir to WASM but enables the possibility !
regards
As far as I can tell that allows reading of wasm binaries into elixir, but doesn’t do any execution. WaspVM both reads and executes webassembly
It is sort of possible. AtomVM doesn’t have all the features of Erlang/Elixir
I’ve just been too busy to persue this further:
https://github.com/bettio/AtomVM/issues/30
