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Extism makes WebAssembly easy

dylibso.com

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Re: Extism makes WebAssembly easy

#12

Post by davexunit »

segphault wrote: post #5

The idea of Wasm as a universal plugin system is very promising. But string passing is maybe not the best example to highlight, considering that Wasm is introducing stringref to enable zero-copy string sharing between the Wasm runtime and host language. https://github.com/WebAssembly/stringref/blob/main/proposals...

I'm working on a WASM project[0] with Andy, the stringref champion, and unfortunately the future for stringref is uncertain. There is now a new proposed alternative called "JS string builtins"[1]. The way we intend to ship support for strings currently is to just use JS string builtins, because it is just a set of imported functions, not new instructions. Those imports can either be provided by efficient, native compiled functions (currently behind a V8 feature flag, not sure if other JS engines support it) or from a JS polyfill. It's not an ideal situation but this will allow for shipping strings that work in all browsers with default settings.

[0] https://gitlab.com/spritely/guile-hoot

[1] https://github.com/WebAssembly/js-string-builtins/blob/main/...

Re: Extism makes WebAssembly easy

#13

Post by beepbooptheory »

This and its relatives feel like such a weird positioning choice for a company. If you have resolved to use some client library to do your heavy lifting, you want one focused and hardened on the specific language you are using, not one library of a dozen libraries spuriously maintained by a startup which will most likely eventually deprecate the library if its not used with their Edge hosting service or whatever.

The huge list of languages does not inspire confidence. Like how going to a restaurant where the menu says they have amazing pizza and pho and ice cream makes one think that all three of those items are pretty bad.

Re: Extism makes WebAssembly easy

#15

Post by bhelx »

yebyen wrote: post #7

This blog article is great, I had a hell of a time integrating Wasm into Ruby, so much so to the point that I gave up. I was absolutely going to call a function, pass it some HTML to parse (as a string), and return a number, but what I wound up doing is pass a directory with some HTML file in it, return a number as a string, and parse it. Because after struggling with wasmtime and wasmer until I could see it was not…

I've been working on a new Ruby SDK for Extism 1.0 if you want to check it out: https://github.com/extism/ruby-sdk

I added host function support and cleaned up the API a bit.

Re: Extism makes WebAssembly easy

#17

Post by nilslice »

ramesh31 wrote: post #11

This is an ad. Just use WASI.

WASI is great and obviously Extism supports it as a superset of functionality - but you don’t always want to give your guest code access to system resources even in a limited environment.

Extism also offers a bunch of other features that you don’t get with WASI. But use what’s best suited for your needs!

Re: Extism makes WebAssembly easy

#18

Post by nilslice »

beepbooptheory wrote: post #13

This and its relatives feel like such a weird positioning choice for a company. If you have resolved to use some client library to do your heavy lifting, you want one focused and hardened on the specific language you are using, not one library of a dozen libraries spuriously maintained by a startup which will most likely eventually deprecate the library if its not used with their Edge hosting service or whatever. The…

this makes no sense at all

Re: Extism makes WebAssembly easy

#19

Post by bhelx »

yebyen wrote: post #7

This blog article is great, I had a hell of a time integrating Wasm into Ruby, so much so to the point that I gave up. I was absolutely going to call a function, pass it some HTML to parse (as a string), and return a number, but what I wound up doing is pass a directory with some HTML file in it, return a number as a string, and parse it. Because after struggling with wasmtime and wasmer until I could see it was not…

This is great so far btw! Going to watch this whole talk today.
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