After two and a half years of work with Patrick Dubroy, we are happy to announce the release of WebAssembly from the Ground Up, a book that teaches you about WebAssembly 1.0 by building a simple compiler in JavaScript with Ohm/JS.

Here’s a 25% discount code you can use: FOCWASM25

We decided to do a “digital first” book to take advantage of interactivity and “explorable explanations”, and learned a couple of things along the way.

We also decided that all the code should be in the book and that it should run if you copy and paste the snippets as you read.

To achieve this we had to create most of the tooling around the book ourselves:

• The server that handles authentication and access to the book
• The script that extracts the snippets from the original source code and generates:

• The snippets you can copy to clipboard.
• The “Copy up to here” code segments.
• The checkpoints and chapter modules in the code repo, accessible through stackblitz.
• The emit library, a standalone library to emit WebAssembly 1.0 binary modules.

• The early access feedback system using embedded hypothes.is
• PDF generation (puppeteer, pdftk, imagemagick, poppler).
• A tool to generate code snippet ranges for “highlight on text hover”.

We plan on writing about some of our takeaways in the coming weeks, but that will have to wait. 😅

Let us know if you have any questions!

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Hey all, I released ActuarialPlayground.com : an interactive and visual actuarial cashflow model, where the calculations are described by calculang.

There is a 7min video where I use the Playground to explore some things here: youtube.com/watch?v=S-cX7CmH0eA

I made remarks about the calculang model and especially model composition, that you can read under the '❓' tab

calculang outputs a JS bundle you can see under '🌟' - obviously a lot can be done with it in a pretty familiar way

This is a contrast to calculations rigidly defined in specialised tools, without composition, and without being able to break out or integrate in a tight visual/interactive and exploratory loop

I've turned some notes related to Flash from the last FoC meetup in Berlin into a thread here: bsky.app/profile/mrogalski.eu/post/3lkg25qntbk2l