A Talk Near the Future of Python (a.k.a., Dave live-codes a WebAssembly Interpreter)
Why Hacker News recommends it
Regarded as a brilliant live-coding talk that teaches WASM and interpreter writing, with several calling it among the best conference talks they have seen.
What it is
David Beazley's PyCon India closing keynote, in which he live-codes a stack machine and grows it into an interpreter that runs WebAssembly, then uses it to play a Rust-written game. It requires no prior WebAssembly knowledge.
Recommended by 7 HN commenters across 7 different months, 2019 to 2025.
What Hacker News said
Strong rec kiriliponi · 2019-10 · on “Let's Write an LLVM Specializer for Python (2015)”
I recommand David Beazley's talk from a recent PyCon India on a similar subject : [this video] Mostly live coded, it really is pretty amazing but also quite insightful.
Strong rec VBprogrammer · 2020-12 · on “Ask HN: Best Talks of 2020?”
Ok, it wasnt technically this year but I have to share this one just incase anyone missed it, because it's quite possible the best conference talk I've ever seen. [this video]
Strong rec milliams · 2021-07 · on “WebAssembly from Scratch: From FizzBuzz to DooM”
I found this video [this video] "A Talk Near the Future of Python (a.k.a., Dave live-codes a WebAssembly Interpreter)" to be a brilliant introduction to WASM as well as writing interpreters in general. I'm a relative novice in the subject and it was pitched right at my level.
Recommends tzs · 2019-12 · on “W3C recommends WebAssembly”
I found this [1] quite interesting. It doesn't really answer any of the questions you asked, but I think it gives some interesting insights into WebAssembly, which might make it easier to put other things in context and also give a good low level understanding of it. It's the closing keynote talk at this year's PyCon India. From the description: > In this talk, I live-code a simple stack machine and turn it into an interpreter capable of running WebAssembly. I then use that to play a game written in Rust. [this video]
Recommends kfrane · 2021-06 · on “Pokegb: A gameboy emulator that only plays Pokémon Blue, in 68 lines of C++”
You're right about wasm not being too complicated, I've learned this when watching David Beazley coding a WebAssembly interpreter in under an hour. And it doesn't require any knowledge about it beforehand. [this video]
Recommends newswasboring · 2021-12 · on “Ask HN: Best Tech Talks”
Any talk by Dylan Beattie[1,2] or David Beasley[3,4]. I think they are quite unique in their presentation, they tell a story. [1] [LINK] [2] [LINK] [3] [LINK] [4] [this video]
Recommends skylurk · 2025-12 · on “So you want to speak at software conferences?”
I agree with these, but David Beazley breaks most of them and his talks are way better than mine ;) e.g. [this video]
Cites yesenadam · 2021-08 · on “A Lisp interpreter written in Lisp (2017)”
Sounds like this! Dave Beazley's A Talk Near the Future of Python (a.k.a., Dave live-codes a WebAssembly Interpreter) (2019) [this video]