phasm

Elevator pitch

A programming language, that looks like Python, handles like Haskell, and compiles directly to WebAssembly.

Project state

This is a hobby project for now. Use at your own risk.

How to run

You should only need make and python3. Currently, we're working with python3.10, since we're using the python ast parser, it might not work on other versions.

To run the examples:

make examples

To run the tests:

make test

To run the linting and type checking:

make lint typecheck

To compile a Phasm file:

python3.12 -m phasm source.py output.wat

Additional required tools

At the moment, the compiler outputs WebAssembly text format. To actually get a binary, you will need the wat2wasm tool[6].

Example

For more examples, see the examples directory.

def helper(n: u64, a: u64, b: u64) -> u64:
    if n < 1:
        return a + b

    return helper(n - 1, a + b, a)

@exported
def fib(n: u64) -> u64:
    if n == 0:
        return 0

    if n == 1:
        return 1

    return helper(n - 1, 0, 1)

Gotcha's

• When importing and exporting unsigned values to WebAssembly, they will become signed, as WebAssembly has no native unsigned type. You may need to cast or reinterpret them.
• Currently, Phasm files have the .py extension, which helps with syntax highlighting, that might change in the future.

Contributing

At this time, we're mostly looking for use cases for WebAssembly, other than to compile existing C code and running them in the browser. The goal of WebAssembly is to enable high-performance applications on web pages[5]. Though most people seem to use it to have existing code run in the browser.

If you have a situation where WebAssembly would be useful for it's speed, we're interested to see what you want to use it for.

Also, if you are trying out Phasm, and you're running into a limitation, we're interested in a minimal test case that shows what you want to achieve and how Phasm currently fails you.

Name origin

• p from python
• ha from Haskell
• asm from WebAssembly

References

[1] https://www.python.org/
[2] https://www.haskell.org/
[3] https://webassembly.org/
[4] https://www.w3.org/TR/wasm-core-1/
[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=WebAssembly&oldid=1103639883
[6] https://github.com/WebAssembly/wabt

Links

• https://pengowray.github.io/wasm-ops/
  Shorthand overview for supported operations in WebAssembly.