A survey about programming language support for LiveSplit One's Auto Splitting Runtime

AutoSplittingRuntimeSupport.md

Auto Splitting Runtime Support

Supported languages

Rust

• 👍 Modern language with really good WebAssembly support
• 👍 Great ecosystem where most crates work perfectly fine in WebAssembly
• 👍 Easy project setup
• 👎 Ownership and borrowing make things a little harder
• 👎 WebAssembly files are not small by default (you need a bunch of flags, no_std and co.)

C

• 👍 Good WebAssembly support
• 👍 What you see is what you get (full control over memory)
• 👎 Not super trivial to set up a project (need WASI or other WASM sysroot and makefiles / CMake)
• 👎 No modern language features

TinyGo

• 👍 Easy language
• 👍 Small WebAssembly files by default
• 👎 Requires WASI (only a single import for writing an abort message though, could easily be snipped)
• 👎 Project setup is absurd (GOROOT, GOPATH, go.mod, ...)
• 👎 Huge compiler toolchain (2 GiB)

AssemblyScript

• 👍 Easy language (TypeScript, though with a few semantic differences)
• 👍 Very small WebAssembly files by default
• 👍 Easy project setup
• 👎 Limited and unclear limitations compared to real TypeScript
• 👎 Toxic maintainers (project may even be half abandoned)

Interpreted languages (WIP support)

TypeScript / JavaScript

• 👍 Easy language
• 👍 Easy project setup
• 👎 Slow due to being interpreted
• 👎 The default number type is unsuitable for addresses (floating point)

Not yet supported languages

Go

Early WASI support with no custom imports or exports yet.

C#

Early WASI support with no custom imports or exports yet.

Dart

Requires unfinished WASM proposals such as WASM GC that our runtime doesn't support yet. Freestanding support is somewhat unclear.