On Thu, 2023-06-22 at 14:41 -0700, William Stein wrote: > > WebAssembly is not an experimental linux distribution, and it has very > little overlap with linux distributions. The WebAssembly ecosystem is > built from the ground up, primarily on the LLVM (and Rust) toolchain, and > an ecosystem of free software that is much more liberally licensed (and > smaller) than what is typically in Linux distributions. WebAssembly > is neither better nor worse than Linux distributions; instead it is a > different thing that solves different problems.
Yes, I know what WebAssembly is. The phrase "pip installability" is a essentially euphemism for running a binary linux distribution on pypi using pip as the package manager. On top of the many architecture and libc-specific binaries that we'll have to build and ship and secure forever, you're also suggesting that we maintain LLVM/Rust infrastructure that allows us to ship pre-built WebAssembly targets for all of those packages as well. In addition to the usual sage distribution, and now the pypi distribution, that would mean also maintaining our own LLVM/Rust-based webassembly distribution. It's recreating exactly what Conda, Nix, Guix, etc. all do, except with a more experimental toolchain. That's the main problem: we don't have time to maintain our one existing distribution, and the installation process is already too complicated and confusing. With three, it's going to get more complicated, more confusing, and more bitrotten as we all start to drown under the increased maintenance burden. The second issue is that WebAssembly doesn't actually solve the problems we have, it only pushes them one layer of abstraction up. You can run an entire OS in WebAssembly in a browser sandbox in docker in a virtual machine. So what? Now you have two computers to maintain. To avoid duplicating work, you start to move more and more things into that browser. Eventually, you're right back where you started; things conflict, etc. Except now everything doesn't work at half the speed that it originally didn't work at. There's no way to sweep these problems under the rug, they're fundamental. And instead of focusing on them we keep getting distracted by squirrels. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "sage-devel" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to sage-devel+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/sage-devel/281e65d5ebeb2884b7638a340233db5855d43285.camel%40orlitzky.com.
