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A Talk Near the Future of Python (a.k.a., Dave live-codes a WebAssembly Interpreter)

David Beazley

17K subscribers • 4 videos on Hallway

YouTube
  • Recommended by 9 people: 7 on Hacker News, 1 on Lobsters and 1 in engineering communities.
  • A classic. People kept recommending it from 2019 to 2025.
  • Presented by David Beazley, author and educator

Intermediate. Assumes working knowledge.

25K views7 years ago9 recommendations

Programming languagesSystems programmingPythonWebAssemblyCompilers and interpreters

David Beazley live-codes a stack machine and expands it into a WebAssembly interpreter capable of running a Rust game.

Closing Keynote Talk - PyCon India, Chennai, October 13, 2019 (Screencast). In this talk, I live-code a simple stack machine and turn it into an interpreter capable of running WebAssembly. I then use that to play a game written in Rust. Code written during the talk can be found at gist.github.com/dabeaz/7d8838b54dba5006c58a40fc28da9d5a If you like this sort of madness and want to go more in-depth, come take a course! dabeaz.com/courses.html P.S. The audio is a bit "boomy" in places, but I can't do much about that--this was recorded live in a large conference hall. That's just how it came out.

Why it's here

9 people recommend this

What people say. Widely praised as an exceptionally engaging live-coding talk and a brilliant introduction to WebAssembly internals.

u/mttdin r/ProgrammingLanguages • Recommends

A Talk Near the Future of Python
35View on Reddit

kiriliponion Hacker News • Recommends

On “Let's Write an LLVM Specializer for Python (2015)”

I recommand David Beazley's talk from a recent PyCon India on a similar subject : link to this video Mostly live coded, it really is pretty amazing but also quite insightful.
View on Hacker News

VBprogrammeron Hacker News • Recommends

On “Ask HN: Best Talks of 2020?”

Ok, it wasnt technically this year but I have to share this one just incase anyone missed it, because it's quite possible the best conference talk I've ever seen. link to this video
View on Hacker News

milliamson Hacker News • Recommends

On “WebAssembly from Scratch: From FizzBuzz to DooM”

I found this video link to this video "A Talk Near the Future of Python (a.k.a., Dave live-codes a WebAssembly Interpreter)" to be a brilliant introduction to WASM as well as writing interpreters in general. I'm a relative novice in the subject and it was pitched right at my level.
View on Hacker News

balloonaticon Lobsters • Recommends

"A Talk Near the Future of Python" - live coding a simple VM / web assembly interpreter A talk from PyCon India by David Beazley, who writes a very basic stack machine and evolves it into a wasm interpreter, which then runs a simple arcade game written in rust. I enjoy David Beazley's talks, they're usually quite intense but in a way that's very fun. I know he now teaches a python course based on SICP, and you can see shades of SICP-influenced pedagogy in this talk.
4View on Lobsters

tzson Hacker News • Recommends

On “W3C recommends WebAssembly”

I found this 1 quite interesting. It doesn't really answer any of the questions you asked, but I think it gives some interesting insights into WebAssembly, which might make it easier to put other things in context and also give a good low level understanding of it. It's the closing keynote talk at this year's PyCon India. From the description: > In this talk, I live-code a simple stack machine and turn it into an interpreter capable of running WebAssembly. I then use that to play a game written in Rust. link to this video
View on Hacker News

kfraneon Hacker News • Recommends

On “Pokegb: A gameboy emulator that only plays Pokémon Blue, in 68 lines of C++”

You're right about wasm not being too complicated, I've learned this when watching David Beazley coding a WebAssembly interpreter in under an hour. And it doesn't require any knowledge about it beforehand. link to this video
View on Hacker News

newswasboringon Hacker News • Recommends

On “Ask HN: Best Tech Talks”

Any talk by Dylan Beattie1,2 or David Beasley3,4. I think they are quite unique in their presentation, they tell a story. 1 link 2 link 3 link 4 link to this video
View on Hacker News

skylurkon Hacker News • Recommends

On “So you want to speak at software conferences?”

I agree with these, but David Beazley breaks most of them and his talks are way better than mine ;) e.g. link to this video
View on Hacker News

yesenadamon Hacker News • Mentions

On “A Lisp interpreter written in Lisp (2017)”

Sounds like this! Dave Beazley's A Talk Near the Future of Python (a.k.a., Dave live-codes a WebAssembly Interpreter) (2019) link to this video
View on Hacker News

baneon Hacker News • Mentions

On “Ask HN: What piece of code/codebase blew your mind when you saw it?”

There was a youtube video a few years back that showed a guy livecoding...I think an ECMA interpreter, or maybe a WASM interpreter from scratch using some very easy to follow code. I can't remember what it was or the video, but it was gobsmacking. So instead here's another story. I once worked with an old Perl greybeard, he had written some kind of code that could parse an almost impossible large set of string formats that a large collection of automated systems produced except they all had some sort of non-standard/non-guaranteed formatting or semantics. Little bits and pieces (some semi-atomic bits) of them were semi-reliable, but the aggregate strings were just a huge mess, things came in…
View on Hacker News