JavaScript vs. Racket vs. Valispace vs. WebAssembly Comparison Chart

Racket is a general-purpose, multi-paradigm programming language that serves as a modern dialect of Lisp and a descendant of Scheme. It is designed as a platform for programming language design and implementation, enabling developers to create new domain-specific and general-purpose languages. Racket's core language includes features such as macros, modules, lexical closures, tail calls, delimited continuations, parameters (fluid variables), software contracts, green threads, and OS threads. The language also comes with primitives, such as event spaces and custodians, which control resource management and enable the language to act like an operating system for loading and managing other programs. Further extensions to the language are created with the powerful macro system, which, together with the module system and custom parsers, can control all aspects of a language. Most language constructs in Racket are implemented as macros in the base language.

WebAssembly (abbreviated Wasm) is a binary instruction format for a stack-based virtual machine. Wasm is designed as a portable compilation target for programming languages, enabling deployment on the web for client and server applications. The Wasm stack machine is designed to be encoded in a size- and load-time-efficient binary format. WebAssembly aims to execute at native speed by taking advantage of common hardware capabilities available on a wide range of platforms. WebAssembly describes a memory-safe, sandboxed execution environment that may even be implemented inside existing JavaScript virtual machines. When embedded in the web, WebAssembly will enforce the same-origin and permissions security policies of the browser. WebAssembly is designed to be pretty-printed in a textual format for debugging, testing, experimenting, optimizing, learning, teaching, and writing programs by hand. The textual format will be used when viewing the source of Wasm modules on the web.