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WASI 0.3

bytecodealliance.org

101–103 of 103 posts

Re: WASI 0.3

#101
post #11

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 wa…

The work is being done quite publicly, it's just not narrated particularly well. You can go look at the commits and github posts happening! It's all very public. There's extensive discussions ongoing.

My guess is that there's a bit of a circular issue, where the team doesn't particularly see lots of good/useful feedback when they do try hard to explain the work, and drive-by folks like me and you don't have much to see or grasp at when we do take a pass through the repos to try to see what's going on. They do have regularly scheduled meetings though, which are open attendance, if you want to try to ask in person for more help: I don't know how that would go, but I doubt you've tried.

It has been nice to have LLMs for the past year, which have helped summarize what's been going on in various wasm repositories.

That said, I agree with you on two fronts. Yes: dynamic hotload and linking is very high on my want list. Trying to get to a place where we have lightweight isolates like things that can use existing loaded libraries has been the northstar, and one I'd love to see start to become real.

Second, it is really hard to figure out what is and isn't possible, to assess and try the tools to see how far you can get. There's also a lot of old documentation floating around, so if you for example go use rust there's a 33% chance you'll happen upon material that points you in the wrong direction.

Re: WASI 0.3

#102
post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, you missed people asking for years: away to do interop between languages in WASM, a way to interact with browser APIs without JavaScript from WASM. Component model enable both using one thing.

> way to do interop between languages This problem stems from the lack of a standardized component model. WASM is merely another casualty of that deficiency - one among hundreds of affected technologies. The alliance is attempting to solve the problem at the wrong level and only for WASM, rather than addressing the root cause in a way that would benefit everyone.

Why WASM folks need to solve for not WASM?

Re: WASI 0.3

#103
post #54
post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, you missed people asking for years: away to do interop between languages in WASM, a way to interact with browser APIs without JavaScript from WASM. Component model enable both using one thing.

Fair enough. Isn't that another topic more tied to WASM compare to what initially claimed to be a "System Interface" and not a language interface or a browser interface?

Do you know see how components model solves all three?

If WASI decided to keep bespoke runtime capabilities, then you would have whole zoo of:

  - this runtime does support WASI

  - this runtime does NOT support WASI

  - this one supports WASI, but only older spec

  - this claims to support WASI, but X/Y/Z capabilities are bugged
I think WASI switching to components was the right move. Sure, tooling right now maybe meh outside of rust (and even rust is still meh), but once things stabilize good tooling is to follow.
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