Scheme in Scheme on WASM in the browser (opens in new tab)

The article is presenting a Scheme interpreter running in Scheme, compiled to WASM, not a Scheme compiler, but your idea is also cool. The WASM API apparently doesn't need a pre-made file as its input: you can pass raw bytes generated during runtime into the Module constructor, so it would be totally feasible.

Someone actually wrote a scheme back in 2017 https://github.com/google/schism so this isnt new. Infact the whole idea of WASM is not new, 20 yrs back Sun had the same idea, embed compiled bytecode inside browser called applets, developed in JAVA. Even flash was a similar idea, though flash VM was riddled with security flaws. This failed to gain wider acceptance, now 20 yrs later we have a embedded bytecode compiler in the browser, but it may work this time.

The demo is embedded in a iframe towards the bottom of the post. If you are using a browser that is Wasm GC and tail call capable, you'll see something that resembles the gif at the top of the post. If not, you'll see a message about needing to use a different browser.

Seemingly

https://v8.dev/blog/wasm-tail-call

Alas, the focus is on optimizing job placement at graduation, so intellectually engaging choices are lower priority. We’re in a situation where CS departments are incentivized to spend every year that a student is in school optimizing their ability to produce BFS or DFS in Python within 15 minutes.

Ihave been using guile extensively for a couple of years. It has destroyed writing recursive functions in other languages for me. There are no stack overflows in guile, and a recursive function won't fail until you have used all a avilable memory. This lets you write very elegant functions in places where the state is a tree or a linear data structure. Doing the same in python means having to actually deal with state. It just feels so unnecessary and error prone.