Orca: WebAssembly Apps Without the Web
Orca is developing a cross-platform application stack with a canvas API for 2D graphics and WebGPU backend. It has improved tooling, moved to GitHub, and aims for unified graphical application development.
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Orca is developing a new stack for cross-platform applications, focusing on a canvas API for 2D vector graphics and a WebGPU compute backend for rendering. Recent updates include a streamlined user tooling, a wasm-compatible C standard library, and enhancements to the vector graphics backend. The project has transitioned to a more permissive license and moved its code repository to GitHub, allowing public access and sponsorship for development. Feedback from users has been collected to address tooling issues encountered during the build and usage of Orca. The initiative aims to create a unified platform for developing, distributing, and running sandboxed graphical applications across various operating systems. The Orca team has been actively sharing progress through blog posts, including an end-of-year recap highlighting significant developments over the past year. The project is led by Martin Fouilleul, who has acknowledged the contributions of early collaborators in making the codebase accessible. Overall, Orca is positioned as a promising framework for developers interested in creating cross-platform applications without relying on traditional web technologies.
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- There are questions about the feasibility of porting the application to iOS due to restrictions on running WASM.
- Some users express skepticism about the choice of using WASM3, citing its maintenance status.
- Concerns are raised about the lack of Linux support for a cross-platform project.
- Users highlight the challenges of cross-platform UI development and the need for a mature solution.
- There are discussions about the programming language used, with some preferring alternatives like TypeScript.
13 commentsStill interesting though, I’m always fascinated to see what uses come from the WASM sandbox. But I personally won’t be hand crafting UIs in C if I don’t have to.
I don't like this timeline. I can't visit home and I can't have typed continuations in a lightweight wasm interpreter either.
If you want to write an app which will target all the major platforms (3 desktops and two mobiles), want a native look and minimal effort for every platform you target, there is nothing apart from QT. And it's a real pain to deal with unmanaged memory. Also, QT is a mess, you cannot define your interfaces declaratively (with QML) and easily interact with them from C++ code, you won't have any typings. So, you either have to go the ancient way of imperative UI definitions or do everything in QML which is total mess.
If you drop native look requirement, some small things like https://www.egui.rs/ might work for you.
If you drop the minimal effort requirement, all the webivew based mess might help you but it won't be easy due to multiple reasons.
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Orb leverages Elixir's ecosystem to simplify WebAssembly writing, offering features like composable modules, Hex package manager, ExUnit testing, macros, and syntax highlighting. It enables Elixir code compilation to .wasm, supports reusable modules, and integrates existing Elixir libraries for MIME tasks, showcasing flexibility in WebAssembly development.
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