Issue #3’s opening assumption — that wasm would need a no_std campaign — died in the first hour, pleasantly. wasm32-unknown-unknown ships full std (threads and files trap at runtime rather than failing to compile), so the real blockers were exactly four native-only dependencies: curl, fjall, stacker, and tokio’s multi-threaded runtime. Target- and feature-gating those got fmpl-core compiling for wasm32 with the native build untouched.
The gating surfaced a wrong assumption worth recording: fjall was not all behind the fjall-persistence feature flag. Stream overflow spill, parse-state save, and the persistence envelope are live in default native builds — so the wasm exclusion had to be cfg(not(target_arch = "wasm32")) seams at each touchpoint, not a feature toggle. Those seams are now the documented slot-in points if a persistent browser image (IndexedDB-backed) ever becomes a goal — a direction the upstream author raised in review.
The gating surfaced a wrong assumption worth recording: fjall was not all behind the fjall-persistence feature flag. Stream overflow spill, parse-state save, and the persistence envelope are live in default native builds — so the wasm exclusion had to be cfg(not(target_arch = "wasm32")) seams at each touchpoint, not a feature toggle. Those seams are now the documented slot-in points if a persistent browser image (IndexedDB-backed) ever becomes a goal — a direction the project’s creator, Norman Nunley, raised in review.
The deploy fork point: commit the built .wasm to the repo (simple, binary-in-git) or switch GitHub Pages to Actions-based deploys that rebuild it from source on every push. We chose Actions — the binary never lands in git, and the live REPL can’t drift from main. That choice quietly paid off in §4: when the parser changed, the browser REPL picked it up on the next push with zero extra work.
This log is the prequel to Closing the Loop and the making-of behind the engineering tour. FMPL itself is a Rust revival of a 1992 MUD language; this is the log of reviving the revival.
+This log is the prequel to Closing the Loop and the making-of behind the engineering tour. FMPL itself is Norman Nunley’s Rust-built descendant of a 1992 MUD language; this is the log of reviving his revival.