Keynote: Christian Heimes - Python 3.11 in the Web Browser - A Journey

We are happy to announce Christian Heimes as a keynote speaker for the conference!

Python 3.11 in the Web Browser - A Journey

Python 3.11 alpha comes with experimental support for Web Assembly and can be built to run in modern web browsers or Node.js out of the box. Christian is going to show how this was achieved, which obstacles were faced, and what is missing to have fully working “Python for the web” still.

Python is ubiquitous, popular and runs almost everywhere – even on Mars. But there is one place that Python has not yet conquered: the browser. Python 3.11 may finally lay the foundation to make an old dream come true and have Python in the web browser.

In his keynote Christian will explain how to cross-compile CPython 3.11 to Web Assembly and demonstrate how to run CPython in JavaScript engines.

We will look into:

• Why are some core developers and contributors working on Web Assembly port?
• What is WASM and how do builds for browser, node, and WASI differ? What are the features and limitations of different WASM targets?
• A short introduction to Python’s build system and how cross compiling works.
• What problems did we run into and how did we have to modify CPython’s sources for WASM?
• What is missing to make web browser support stable and usable in production?
• A comparison to existing solutions like Pyodide.
• What does WASM support mean for the community and PyPI packages?

About Christian Heimes

Christian is an open source developer and Python core developer from Hamburg/Germany. He is well known for his work in the Python Security Response Team and as maintainer of CPython's ssl module.