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WASI 0.2.0 and Why It Matters

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Re: WASI 0.2.0 and Why It Matters

#11

Post by make3 »

PedroBatista wrote: post #6

About Wasm and WASI, I'll try ( and probably fail ) to escape the HN stereotype so please forgive me. I've been more of less following this for a decade ( since asm.js ), I still fail to see a practical use for this. And I mean a generalized use in real products and systems that stand the test of being an actual economically viable product, not cool demos which running Doom is probably the best one from a technical p…

We've seen a lot of ppl write electron apps because they're portable. I see this as electron/jvm for code that already exists in non vm languages, so that in theory you don't need to do nearly as much rewriting, or any at all. that's pretty cool.

Re: WASI 0.2.0 and Why It Matters

#12

Post by Capricorn2481 »

pjmlp wrote: post #7

WASI aka redoing CLR Common Language Specification. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Language_Infrastructure https://ecma-international.org/publications-and-standards/st... > This Standard defines the Common Language Infrastructure (CLI) in which applications written in multiple high-level languages can be executed in different system environments without the need to rewrite those applications to take into consid…

I've seen you comment this on a lot WASM posts (often as a criticism) so I have to ask, as someone who doesn't have knowledge of either, what is bad about this? Even if Web Assembly only has a subset of what CLR offers, isn't it a good thing a standard has been created that people are actually able to implement?

If Microsoft was not aligned with developers in the early 2000's, that failure is on them.

Re: WASI 0.2.0 and Why It Matters

#13

Post by PedroBatista »

make3 wrote: post #11
PedroBatista wrote: post #6

About Wasm and WASI, I'll try ( and probably fail ) to escape the HN stereotype so please forgive me. I've been more of less following this for a decade ( since asm.js ), I still fail to see a practical use for this. And I mean a generalized use in real products and systems that stand the test of being an actual economically viable product, not cool demos which running Doom is probably the best one from a technical p…

We've seen a lot of ppl write electron apps because they're portable. I see this as electron/jvm for code that already exists in non vm languages, so that in theory you don't need to do nearly as much rewriting, or any at all. that's pretty cool.

Yes, that's the idea. In theory.. :)

Re: WASI 0.2.0 and Why It Matters

#14

Post by rockwotj »

PedroBatista wrote: post #6

About Wasm and WASI, I'll try ( and probably fail ) to escape the HN stereotype so please forgive me. I've been more of less following this for a decade ( since asm.js ), I still fail to see a practical use for this. And I mean a generalized use in real products and systems that stand the test of being an actual economically viable product, not cool demos which running Doom is probably the best one from a technical p…

I have compiled JQ to wasi (in terms of moderately complex ( and useful )).

Took me a couple of hours, mostly because of some pthread stuff I had to noop. And that's being fixed with wasi-threads

https://github.com/rockwotj/jq-wasi

Re: WASI 0.2.0 and Why It Matters

#15

Post by kcolford »

pjmlp wrote: post #7

WASI aka redoing CLR Common Language Specification. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Language_Infrastructure https://ecma-international.org/publications-and-standards/st... > This Standard defines the Common Language Infrastructure (CLI) in which applications written in multiple high-level languages can be executed in different system environments without the need to rewrite those applications to take into consid…

That’s only used for .NET and other ms technologies. There is a totally different ecosystem surrounding WebAssembly.

Re: WASI 0.2.0 and Why It Matters

#16

Post by mc_woods »

ilaksh wrote: post #3

That's amazing to see those things in WASI finally. But they also mention components. Does that mean components are part of the web assembly standard now? And am I correct in assuming that components are an option for projects where the functionality of WASI still isn't adequate?

The WebAssembly standard breaks into two parts, "core WASM" which is the spec the browsers use and everyone else. Then in the non-browser space there is WASI (system interface specification). The WASI-Preview 2 standard uses component model as the underlying mechanism for implementing the APIs it supports. It is not compatible with existing WASI functions... you need to change your binary with an adapter to get existing wasi binaries to run preview2, and of course, preview2 binaries won't work on non-preview 2 runtimes...

Re: WASI 0.2.0 and Why It Matters

#17

Post by stanac »

pjmlp wrote: post #7

WASI aka redoing CLR Common Language Specification. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Language_Infrastructure https://ecma-international.org/publications-and-standards/st... > This Standard defines the Common Language Infrastructure (CLI) in which applications written in multiple high-level languages can be executed in different system environments without the need to rewrite those applications to take into consid…

Are you saying that they are just copying MS or MS is controlling the standard, or that we don't need the standard because we have CLR?

Regardless I think WASM and WASI are huge step in right direction since most if not all relevant languages are going to support it.

Re: WASI 0.2.0 and Why It Matters

#18

Post by mc_woods »

rockwotj wrote: post #14
PedroBatista wrote: post #6

About Wasm and WASI, I'll try ( and probably fail ) to escape the HN stereotype so please forgive me. I've been more of less following this for a decade ( since asm.js ), I still fail to see a practical use for this. And I mean a generalized use in real products and systems that stand the test of being an actual economically viable product, not cool demos which running Doom is probably the best one from a technical p…

I have compiled JQ to wasi (in terms of moderately complex ( and useful )). Took me a couple of hours, mostly because of some pthread stuff I had to noop. And that's being fixed with wasi-threads https://github.com/rockwotj/jq-wasi

unfortunately wasi-threads is deprecated. You'll need to wait for threading support from "core-wasm" and that's a while off, there is no date on the horizon for this, as far as I know.

WASI-threads is not compatible with WASI-Preview2

Re: WASI 0.2.0 and Why It Matters

#19

Post by stetrain »

pjmlp wrote: post #7

WASI aka redoing CLR Common Language Specification. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Language_Infrastructure https://ecma-international.org/publications-and-standards/st... > This Standard defines the Common Language Infrastructure (CLI) in which applications written in multiple high-level languages can be executed in different system environments without the need to rewrite those applications to take into consid…

The tech world is full of standards that didn't catch on universally for one reason or another.

If a new attempt can try the same idea, learn some lessons, and get more traction then I think that's a good thing.

Re: WASI 0.2.0 and Why It Matters

#20

Post by flohofwoe »

PedroBatista wrote: post #6

About Wasm and WASI, I'll try ( and probably fail ) to escape the HN stereotype so please forgive me. I've been more of less following this for a decade ( since asm.js ), I still fail to see a practical use for this. And I mean a generalized use in real products and systems that stand the test of being an actual economically viable product, not cool demos which running Doom is probably the best one from a technical p…

Might be part of the nerd kingdom for you, but I recently made pretty cool use of WASM+WASI in a VSCode extension:

https://floooh.github.io/2023/12/31/vscode-wasm-wasi.html

Also quite a few 'CPU nerds' found my 'visual6502 remixes' useful so far:

https://floooh.github.io/visual6502remix/

https://floooh.github.io/visualz80remix/

Development experience with Emscripten and WASI SDK is fine really (in the sense that these are "just another gcc-style cross-compilation toolchain"), and with those it's not much different than bringing a C code base to any other platform. It depends a lot on how portable the code is in the first place of course.

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