Announce SwiftWasm 5.5.0 and related releases

Content/posts/5-5-released.md

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+---
+date: 2021-11-29 10:10
+description: SwiftWasm 5.5.0 with support for `async`/`await` and Apple Silicon has been released.
+---
+
+# SwiftWasm 5.5.0 is now available
+
+We're happy to announce the new release of SwiftWasm tracking upstream Swift 5.5! Notably, in
+this release we've added support for `async`/`await`. This new feature of Swift can be integrated
+with JavaScript promises when you're using a new version of
+[JavaScriptKit](https://github.com/swiftwasm/JavaScriptKit) that was recently tagged. See the corresponding
+section below for more details.
+
+Since multi-threading in WebAssembly is still not supported across all browsers
+([Safari is the only one lagging behind](https://webassembly.org/roadmap/)), this release of
+SwiftWasm doesn't include the Dispatch library and ships with a single-threaded cooperative executor. This means
+that `actor` declarations in your code will behave as plain reference types and will all be scheduled
+on the main thread. If you need true parallel computation, you’ll have to write
+custom code against the
+[Web Workers API](https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Web_Workers_API/Using_web_workers)
+(either via JavaScriptKit or delegating to raw JavaScript) to synchronize
+multiple SwiftWasm runtimes.
+
+Additionally, 5.5.0 is the first release of SwiftWasm that supports Apple Silicon natively.
+The latest version of [`carton`](https://github.com/swiftwasm/carton) (0.12.0)
+will download the `arm64` distribution on Apple Silicon devices.
+
+## New JavaScriptKit runtime
+
+The 0.11 release of [JavaScriptKit](https://github.com/swiftwasm/JavaScriptKit) adds
+support for `async`/`await` and `JSPromise` integration. Now instances of this
+class have an effectful `async` property `value`. Here's example code that shows you how
+can `fetch` browser API be used without callbacks:
+
+```swift
+import JavaScriptKit
+import JavaScriptEventLoop
+
+// This line is required for `JSPromise.value` to work.
+JavaScriptEventLoop.installGlobalExecutor()
+
+private let jsFetch = JSObject.global.fetch.function!
+func fetch(_ url: String) -> JSPromise {
+    JSPromise(jsFetch(url).object!)!
+}
+
+struct Response: Decodable {
+    let uuid: String
+}
+
+let alert = JSObject.global.alert.function!
+let document = JSObject.global.document
+
+var asyncButtonElement = document.createElement("button")
+asyncButtonElement.innerText = "Fetch UUID demo"
+asyncButtonElement.onclick = .object(JSClosure { _ in
+    Task {
+        do {
+            let response = try await fetch("https://httpbin.org/uuid").value
+            let json = try await JSPromise(response.json().object!)!.value
+            let parsedResponse = try JSValueDecoder().decode(Response.self, from: json)
+            alert(parsedResponse.uuid)
+        } catch {
+            print(error)
+        }
+    }
+
+    return .undefined
+})
+
+_ = document.body.appendChild(asyncButtonElement)
+```
+
+Also, in this version of JavaScriptKit we're simplifying the `JSClosure` API. You no longer need to
+release instances of this class manually, as they will be automatically garbage-collected by the browser
+after neither your Swift code nor the JavaScript runtime hold any references to them. This is achieved with the new
+`FinalizationRegistry` Web API, for which we had to significantly increase minimum browser versions
+required for JavaScriptKit to work. See [`README.md`](https://github.com/swiftwasm/JavaScriptKit#readme)
+in the project repository for more details.
+
+We have to mention that there's still a possibility of reference cycles with this new API. `FinalizationRegistry`
+doesn't implement full GC for JS closures, but it only solves dangling closure issue. For example,
+in this code
+
+```
+var button = document.createElement("button")
+button.onclick = .object(JSClosure { [button] in
+  // this capture makes a reference cycle
+  print(button)
+})
+```
+
+a reference cycle is created
+
+```
+┌─> JSObject (button in Swift) -> HTMLElement (button in JS) ────┐
+└── JSClosure (onclick in Swift) <─> Closure (onclick in JS) <───┘
+```
+
+In this case, when `button` element is removed from the main DOM tree, it cannot be deallocated.
+The `onlick` closure is still referenced by the button itself. These reference cycles can be resolved
+with the usual `weak` captures you're probably used to writing in your AppKit and UIKit code.
+
+## Tokamak
+
+Based on the improvements to JavaScriptKit and major work by our contributors, we're also tagging
+a new 0.9.0 release of [Tokamak](https://github.com/TokamakUI/Tokamak), a SwiftUI-compatible
+framework for building browser apps with WebAssembly. We've added:
+
+- `Canvas` and `TimelineView` types;
+- `onHover` modifier;
+- `task` modifier for running `async` functions;
+- Sanitizers for the `Text` view.
+
+Tokamak v0.9.0 now requires Swift 5.4 or newer. Swift 5.5 (with SwiftWasm
+5.5 when targeting the browser environment) is recommended.
+
+## Acknowledgements
+
+We'd like to thank [our sponsors](https://github.com/sponsors/swiftwasm) for their support, which
+allowed us to continue working on SwiftWasm and related project.
+
+Additionally, we'd like to thank everyone who contributed their work and helped us make this release
+happen. These new releases wouldn't be possible without the hard work of (in alphabetical order):
+
+- [@agg23](https://github.com/agg23)
+- [@carson-katri](https://github.com/carson-katri)
+- [@ezraberch](https://github.com/ezraberch)
+- [@Feuermurmel](https://github.com/Feuermurmel)
+- [@kateinoigakukun](https://github.com/kateinoigakukun)
+- [@MaxDesiatov](https://github.com/MaxDesiatov)
+- [@mbrandonw](https://github.com/mbrandonw)
+- [@PatrickPijnappel](https://github.com/PatrickPijnappel)
+- [@yonihemi](https://github.com/yonihemi/)
+- all of our users, and everyone working on the Swift project and libraries we depend on!