Index creation through a WASM API

[RobertCraigie]

Hey! Really liking this project so far but I'm in a more abnormal situation where I'm deploying both an entirely statically generated site & a version that is dynamically updated based on user values.

Pagefind obviously works great in the former case but in the latter I need to rebuild the index myself and in this environment I can't use Node.js or Python so the existing wrappers don't work.

What would work perfectly for me is essentially a version of the Node.js API that's accessible using WASM (but obviously doesn't provide any of the fs-related methods).

Any thoughts here? Would a PR adding a WASM API be welcome?

[bglw]

Interesting! I'm not against the concept, but I'm not sure I understand exactly what you propose.

The Python & Node APIs each wrap a native Pagefind binary and communicate with it, which wouldn't be possible from WASM. (Maybe it is from WASI?)

I expect you would need to compile it all into one WASM, in which case I think filesize is going to be a barrier. If this is to be loaded in a web browser, the native binaries are quite large.

If this is running through something like Wasmtime instead then I could see it being viable — but in that case since you have a native system I think using the Rust library would behave better.

Interested to see what you end up with if you do explore this, but I don't want to make any commitment either way on merging something in :)