With the patches to LLVM Flang, WebR can be built with a real Fortran compiler.
I think George didn't want to say it directly in the blog post, but he has said that he's hoping that Flang would take his patches or implement better ones. That would be a win-win -- these patches wouldn't need to be maintained separately, and since unmodified Flang would be able to compile to wasm, it would benefit other projects out there that use Fortran.
/* f2c.h -- Standard Fortran to C header file /
/* barf [ba:rf] 2. "He suggested using FORTRAN, and everybody barfed."
I tried to organize many physics subjects in a similar manner, with many worked out examples (minimal, but non-trivial/complete):
I would recommend using top-of-tree llvm-project/main sources for building f18; we are a fast-moving project and it would be a waste of time for anybody to debug a problem that has already been fixed, or miss a feature that has already been implemented.
Does Web Assembly have anything to offer me today as a consumer? Or is all of this still setting the groundwork for a future where programs are truly portable?
I have heard some rumblings that the WA machinery makes it easier to restrict access (network, files) but I do not know if those are theoretical or implemented today.
Also I would say an advantage is that the binary format is not proprietary and there's a spec, so anyone could implement their own Wasm VM.
But right now is not in a good place yet, is too early and there are a lot of new functionality that is being standardized by a group (similar to W3C) and the process is very slow.
Upon googling I often find some ~decade old port of one of the old familiars to javascript (e.g. via emscripten), wondering if I'm missing something.
They write: The LFortran compiler has made great strides over the last few years. In 2020, it was missing a lot of features and only supported a very small subset of Fortran. Now it now supports a much wider range of language features and can be used to compile a reasonable amount of Fortran code. It can even compile to WebAssembly out of the box!
However, there are still some barriers that make using LFortran a little rough. The project is currently considered to be in alpha phase and the developers state that issues compiling real-world code are expected. While it can successfully compile some projects, such as MINPACK, the full Fortran specification is not yet supported and so many larger projects still cannot be compiled.
The LFortran developers are targeting full support for Fortran 2018, and its standout feature is an interactive Jupyter-like Fortran REPL. With a few more years of development, I expect that LFortran will be an excellent choice for compiling Fortran code for WebAssembly.
and
Check out the LFortran demo at https://dev.lfortran.org. While extremely impressive, note that the first thing I tried was changing x * 2 to x * 3 and saw that such a change is currently not supported by the code generator.
The demo at https://dev.lfortran.org uses our direct WASM backend that does not use LLVM. It is currently more limited, and indeed, we currently do not support the cubic power x**3 there, only square power x**2. Our most advanced backend is LLVM, and that of course supports x**3 and a very wide subset of Fortran (such as 60% of all SciPy packages fully compile and all SciPy tests pass). However, LLVM is huge and relatively slow, so we do not use LLVM in the online demo, which runs the compiler itself in the browser.
For offline LLVM based WASM compilation I think LFortran is ready be tried. We'll be happy to help!
WebAssembly sits in the background quietly powering the web-based versions of products like Adobe Photoshop, AutoCAD, Figma, Canva, and likely others. By using Wasm components combined with other browser technologies such as HTML canvas and webGL, app performance and responsiveness can be improved.
WebAssembly also powers the Pyodide and webR projects, enabling Python and R code to run in a browser without a supporting computational server. Where I’ve seen this used most effectively so far is in teaching materials, particularly for teaching data science, where interactive R and Python examples can be embedded directly into teaching materials without the educator having to worry about the time or expense to deploy a powerful backend service to evaluate learner’s code.
https://docs.r-wasm.org/webr/latest/ https://github.com/jupyterlite/jupyterlite https://dev.lfortran.org/
There are rough edges to be sure, but the potential is great in education I think.
When you use something like the Video element on the Web then it's obvious - you see a video playing - but wasm is just a technical detail that you might not notice as a user. But it often makes things faster or easier to port or to develop, and it is used quite widely (though far less widely than JavaScript, for example).
