WASI 0.3 • Hacker News Board

Re: WASI 0.3

#11

Post by b33j0r » Fri, Jun 12, 2026, 2:53 PM UTC

Love/hate with this one. How was I supposed to follow this? I tried, and few things were publicly visible for nearly two years. I last checked in march and it looked like no progress had been made.

That makes me very suspicious of wasiv3. Funny enough, I already implemented a bunch of the promises (pun not intended) and think that freestanding wasm with custom integrations is the more likely future.

The promise of wasi components has not been fulfilled. The market wants to hotload and link artifacts dynamically. The wasi project requires insider wizardry to use it that way: the offering has been statically linking components before you ship. Defeating 99% of the use cases.

I do not like that this has been worked on in the shadows.

Re: WASI 0.3

#12

Post by lifty » Fri, Jun 12, 2026, 2:54 PM UTC

If you have used WASI in the past, can you mention your use case? Very curious if you found it to give you an edge compared to other sandboxing like containers or VMs.

Re: WASI 0.3

#13

Post by simonw » Fri, Jun 12, 2026, 2:55 PM UTC

If you don't want to download the .tar.gz I think you can browse the content for this release (.wit interface files) here on GitHub: https://github.com/WebAssembly/WASI/tree/v0.3.0/proposals

Re: WASI 0.3

#14

Post by OtomotO » Fri, Jun 12, 2026, 2:57 PM UTC

lifty wrote: post #12

If you have used WASI in the past, can you mention your use case? Very curious if you found it to give you an edge compared to other sandboxing like containers or VMs.

extending software with a plugin system

Re: WASI 0.3

#15

Post by callahad » Fri, Jun 12, 2026, 2:58 PM UTC

shevy-java wrote: post #2

Will WebAssembly ever achieve a real breakthrough? It's been almost 10 years since it came around. HTML, CSS and JavaScript were a breakthrough back in the days. WebAssembly still is not right now; only very few folks or companies use it.

It's a silent technology, but I'd argue it has broken through in that most of us already use it daily without knowing. Figma, Google Sheets, Disney+, Prime Video, and much more all have WebAssembly somewhere in their stack.

Re: WASI 0.3

#16

Post by wongarsu » Fri, Jun 12, 2026, 3:03 PM UTC

CGamesPlay wrote: post #5

shevy-java wrote: post #2

Will WebAssembly ever achieve a real breakthrough? It's been almost 10 years since it came around. HTML, CSS and JavaScript were a breakthrough back in the days. WebAssembly still is not right now; only very few folks or companies use it.

I think its killer use case is actually embedded in non-web places. Tree Sitter parsers require arbitrary programs to be able to parse arbitrary languages. WebAssembly is a natural way to achieve that: write your parser in any language, compile to WebAssembly, use that result in any supported editor. You get sandboxed execution and arbitrary compute. It has to compete with more domain-adapted use cases though. Does W…

Plugin architectures are a niche where WASM really shines. Before WASM most plugins were either high performance (loading dynamic libraries) or sandboxed and safe for untrusted plugins (LUA etc). WASM allows you to have your cake and eat it to. You pay with a bit of complexity, but it's in a great and somewhat unique place in the tradeoff space

Re: WASI 0.3

#17

Post by tdhz77 » Fri, Jun 12, 2026, 3:04 PM UTC

lifty wrote: post #12

If you have used WASI in the past, can you mention your use case? Very curious if you found it to give you an edge compared to other sandboxing like containers or VMs.

Edge rural farm systems

Re: WASI 0.3

#18

Post by garganzol » Fri, Jun 12, 2026, 3:05 PM UTC

Wrong direction. WASI should be simple and stable. Initially, it was revolving around a simple Unix-like API model and it was close to perfect. Now, there is an opinionated component model which is an unneeded overcomplication that should have never been considered as part of WebAssembly spec IMHO.

A real component model is a separate development and cannot be blindly tied to a particular ecosystem. Otherwise, its main purpose of providing easy interoperability between different ecosystems is totally lost.

I do not know why WebAssembly committee thinks that shoving-in CORBA-like monstrosity is even an acceptable idea. Let's keep WebAssembly lean and fast! Anything extra can (and should) be implemented by other technologies.

Re: WASI 0.3

#19

Post by fsloth » Fri, Jun 12, 2026, 3:05 PM UTC

artemonster wrote: post #8

shevy-java wrote: post #2

Will WebAssembly ever achieve a real breakthrough? It's been almost 10 years since it came around. HTML, CSS and JavaScript were a breakthrough back in the days. WebAssembly still is not right now; only very few folks or companies use it.

for me its undebuggability. -"hey, look at our C Rust FORTRAN to WASM translator, blahblah" -"uhm, cool, how do I debug it?" -"yeah...about that...you cant!"

This! The only way to get to a stable system at least with c/c++ source, where you can hunt bugs, is to have a fairly large unit test coverage. When something fails - add that as test case; run ctest - pray that this is discoverable with tests.

So wasm is a really strange compilation target for systems programming languages.

I mean there _are_ ways to debug it in a browser but they sort of suck.

Re: WASI 0.3

#20

Post by tdhz77 » Fri, Jun 12, 2026, 3:06 PM UTC

artemonster wrote: post #8

shevy-java wrote: post #2

Will WebAssembly ever achieve a real breakthrough? It's been almost 10 years since it came around. HTML, CSS and JavaScript were a breakthrough back in the days. WebAssembly still is not right now; only very few folks or companies use it.

for me its undebuggability. -"hey, look at our C Rust FORTRAN to WASM translator, blahblah" -"uhm, cool, how do I debug it?" -"yeah...about that...you cant!"

Why can’t you?