WASM/Javascript build of OpenTimelineIO

[ssteinbach]

Would be nice to have a javascript compatible wrapping of the core library.

[jminor]

We recently had some discussions about this in Slack. I'm just copy/pasting the important bits here for wider visibility.

@JeanChristopheMorinPerso has done some promising work on building JS bindings to OTIO via WASM recently. He says:

I have opentime, Imath, serialization and deserialization functions, SerializableObject, SerializableObjectWithMetadata (including exchange of metadata between JS and C++), custom schema registration and subclassing working. These are all working pretty well (though I need to port the python unit tests to JS)

@rogernelson experimented with building opentime via emscripten.

JS + wasm bindings is something I'd be very interested in. One of the first things I did was emscripten bindings of the opentime library, just as a PoC to see if it would work (which it did). I used it to make a timecode calculator in running in the browser (not especially useful, just an exercise to make sure it worked).

There is a mostly-working WASM build of Raven, which includes OTIO.

Also, for reference.

• Adding Python WASI support to Wasm Language Runtimes
• SQLite Wasm in the browser backed by the Origin Private File System - Chrome Developers

[jminor]

Also, we've been hearing second hand from people attempting to use OTIO in web-native contexts that the lack of Javascript bindings is leading developers to read/write OTIO JSON without using the OTIO API. We would like to discourage that route since it will inevitably lead to incorrect/mismatched behavior and version incompatibility.