Wasm-pack: Consider renaming the project

[Pauan]

When I read "wasm-pack" I think of something that packages .wasm code into a .zip or .tar.gz file. It also might cause some confusion with the npm pack command.

Instead, I think "wasm2npm" or "wasm-to-npm" would be much better names. They make it clear that this tool is designed to be used with npm, and they also make it clearer what it does (it converts .wasm into a form that npm can understand).

[ashleygwilliams]

@Pauan so the goal of this is to eventually be a whole packaging and publishing tool. right now it does the prep work and asks users to use npm to publish, but given that the goal is to have a wasm-pack publish command and wasm-pack pack command i think wasm-pack still works. so i guess tl;dr the name is a little ambitious...

i did never really like the name tho, so i am open to a new one, tho i would like it to be a name that could encompass the full goals of the tool

[Pauan]

Why not just wasm-npm then? wasm-npm publish and wasm-npm pack sound pretty good to me.

[ashleygwilliams]

that's certainly less redundant. @yoshuawuyts @sendilkumarn any thoughts?

[ashleygwilliams]

hrm. the only thing i'm vaguely concerned about is if using the npm name is correct or maybe problematic... there's a large yarn community and tbh the implementation will be agnostic to either of those CLIs tho the default registry will still be the npm one (yarn uses npm's registry). not sure how to sort that.

[Pauan]

I think that's okay (and I'm a big yarn user).

Yeah it can be used with yarn, but publishing is still npm-specific, and all of the specifications (package.json, etc.) are all made by npm.

What use cases do you imagine for people who want to combine wasm-npm and yarn?

[ashleygwilliams]

i wasn't imagine a use case- just not wanting to be divisive.

[ashleygwilliams]

(i used to work at npm and i dont want people to be thinking that im privileging it or something, the internet gets mad)

[Pauan]

I can understand that sentiment, but right now I don't have a better suggestion than wasm-npm

[ashleygwilliams]

so, there's a bunch of blogposts going out and people have made assets so i think until perhaps the epoch we are mostly stuck with this name. tbh i still think it really does what it says it does so i don't really mind, but i'm open to more suggestions. i dont think i want npm to be in the name tho, so if we want to come up with a new one, let's avoid putting npm in the name. thanks!

[sendilkumarn]

@ashleygwilliams I thought somebody is using wasm-pack and you are changing the name because of that, if not please don't change 🙂

[ashleygwilliams]

closing as the name is p squarely stuck at this point.