In yet another ‘probably-useless-but-interesting’ hobby project, I wrote a Forth compiler and interpreter targeting WebAssembly. It’s written entirely in WebAssembly, and comes with a compiler that dynamically emits WebAssembly code on the fly. The entire system (including 80% of all core words) fits into a 10k (5k gzipped) WebAssembly module. You can try it out here, or grab the code from GitHub. What follows are some notes on the design, and some initial crude speed benchmarks.

React’s standard flow is to start with an empty HTML template from the server, and populate the DOM entirely on the client. Letting React pre-render the initial HTML for your app on the server before the client takes over has some advantages, though: it lets slower (mobile) clients load your app much faster, and it’s good for SEO for search engines that don’t support JavaScript. Since you have to run React on the server to do this, you need a JavaScript-able backend, which is why such Universal (a.

React’s standard flow is to start with an empty HTML template from the server, and populate the DOM entirely on the client. Letting React pre-render the initial HTML for your app on the server before the client takes over has some advantages, though: it lets slower (mobile) clients load your app much faster, and it’s good for SEO for search engines that don’t support JavaScript. Since you have to run React on the server to do this, you need a JavaScript-able backend, which is why such Universal (a.

While looking at the demo site of Twenty Fifteen (the theme I use for this blog), I noticed it used infinite scrolling, where more articles get automatically loaded when you reach the end of the page. It looked like a neat thing to have, but since I didn’t actually use WordPress, I couldn’t use the plugins that provide infinite scrolling. Writing it myself seemed like more effort than it was worth, so I dismissed it at the time.