Support for wasm

[trojek]

Feature Request

Support for WebAssembly

Use Case:

Use NATS from browser without using JS binding.

Proposed Change:

Add support for wasm.

Who Benefits From The Change(s)?

People who want to use NATS in WebAssembly.

Alternative Approaches

Use JS binding.

[cameronbraid]

Another important use case is to write a Envoy Proxy Filter https://istio.io/latest/docs/concepts/wasm/

[john-livelyvideo]

any headway on this front?

[derekcollison]

We have looked a bit at getting a port running under TinyGo. What specific use case are you looking for in the browser? I believe you can compile to wasm now and the Go client has websocket support, so wanted to make sure I understood the ask.

[john-livelyvideo]

@derekcollison I'm simply trying to figure out if it's possible to run golang/webassembly in the web browser, while using the go websocket client.

[derekcollison]

Not sure if that would be a good experience over the TS/JS client or not. I think you would need to bridge to JS for access to the websocket IIRC.

[john-livelyvideo]

All we need is a generic interface for sending/recv'ing websocket frames which works both natively and in the browser, right?

https://natsio.slack.com/archives/CM3T6T7JQ/p1652115060809699?thread_ts=1652109614.003509&cid=CM3T6T7JQ

[john-livelyvideo]

there are a slew of other languages which compile to wasm in the browser (ie c#, rust, assemblyscript, c++, etc.), using golang would be my preferred way of bridging over to them via a homegrown local event bus which runs in the browser.

[derekcollison]

@gedw99 the TS/JS clients can do the same. I believe you would need to jump through to JS to access the websocket from the TS/JS client regardless. But I could be wrong.

[john-livelyvideo]

@derekcollison that is correct, but that's a pretty simple interop between golang/js, right? per the framing i mentioned earlier?

[john-livelyvideo]

see the webassembly example in pion as a reference
https://github.com/pion/webrtc/blob/8c31eb98dd78c813d09deb249bdc977b83bff3f0/examples/README.md#webassembly

[derekcollison]

Will take a look, thanks.

[derekcollison]

I am supportive of getting the client to compile under TinyGO, or have another client targeting it. I believe the only thing is the encoded connections and GOB IIRC.

[caspervonb]

Unfortunately this might not be feasible at this time due to upstream blockers.

It seems that TinyGo doesn't support some of the prerequisite runtime functionality needed, such as timers (tinygo-org/tinygo#1037) so ultimately I don't think it's feasible to implement this without having a specialized implementation that avoids the use of those runtime calls completely.

[derekcollison]

There will be a TinyGo client in the future.

[lynic]

Is there any plan to support wasm with websocket?