WebAssembly and Elm

[CSDUMMI]

I have not found the right category for this here, but the following bothers me:
What about WebAsm?
Somewhere in the docs and on this site
you are constantly referred to Web Assembly,
often with regard to compatibility.
I am asking me:

1. What are the plans?
2. What can change, what has to stay, if Elm is ever compiled to Web Assembly?

[Lucas_Payr]

Have you searched for WebAssembly on discourse? This has been discussed a lot.

Quick and short answer:

1. No plans for now
2. good question. From what I know the language is currently designed in such a way, that hopefully nothing needs to change once we can compile to WebAssembly.

For further reading, check out @Brian_Carroll’s work writing a compiler for WebAssembly:

Basic demo of Elm in WebAssembly

Hi folks! Since my last post a month ago, I’ve reached the next milestone in my WebAssembly project and wanted to share. I now have a working demo app! It’s a super-simple “countdown” app, designed to show a few main things: Elm app code “compiled” to WebAssembly (well, hand-translated to C and compiled to Wasm) A simple Cmd effect (Process.sleep) A simple VirtualDom view with an onClick callback This was just enough to force all the major technical issues to do with the “platform”. Most of…

[Brian_Carroll]

Thanks for the mention! Totally agree with everything you said.

1. My project is just an exploration at the moment. I don’t think there are any official plans.
2. From the Elm developer’s perspective, nothing should need to change. I imagine it would end up as a new command line option to elm make. My compiler generates both Wasm and JS for now. It must do that until Wasm matures a bit more (gets web APIs).

I’ve made good progress since the post you linked. Just need to find some time to put together another post, demo, whatever.