Mastodawn

scarfish Dec 16, 2023

@wikimediafoundation has launched @wikifunctions. It's a collaborative collection of functions accessible through an API. Examples include functions like 'area of a circle', 'is palindrome' and 'base64 decode'.

It's built to be #programming language independent. Right now you can write functions in #JavaScript and #Python. Their backend for running user-created Python interesting: they use #RustPython compiled to #WebAssembly running in #Wasmtime.

To see a new Wikimedia project AND it's using awesome technologies like #Rust and WASM fills me with so much joy and excitement

Go check it out: https://www.wikifunctions.org/

Wikifunctions

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jamie !!Feb 10, 2024

@scarfish @wikimediafoundation @wikifunctions super cool idea, hope it goes further
a little disappointed that a lot of functions are just delegates to standard library methods, this seems like the prime place to specifically disallow that and show off proper, improvable implementations

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Wikifunctions Feb 10, 2024

@fenrirre @scarfish @wikimediafoundation

Since we can have more than implementation in any given language, I would say it is fine to have one implementation just using the standard library function -- and have an alternative implementation that does not. I agree that it becomes more interesting and educational by having more alternative implementations.

I also expect the question of "just delegating to the standard library" to become much less pronounced with more complex functions (denny)

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jamie !!

@wikifunctions @scarfish @wikimediafoundation yeah, as it gets wider usage it wont a big deal. if anything, having a range of high-to-low level implementations just further helps teach people not only that solutions exist, but how they work. super cool stuff, gonna be keeping up with this!!!