extism VS jco

No one is saying anyone should stop exploring new paths. I don't know what you personally are bringing to the table as far as adding to the ambition, so excuse my naivety.

The issue is that there is a misrepresentation by the Bytecode Alliance about WASI, from where it began, to where it is now. And a lot of this has been poorly communicated or not done at all. Which has only left many of us to think that they are trying to pull a fast one over the community to forcefully bring everyone along into Components when that is not desirable.

> Wasm has not allowed actual inter-language operation at any serious scale.

This is untrue, and you may just be unaware of efforts like Extism [0]. While it is intentionally not a binding generator, it does make it very easy to blend languages meaningfully. Disclaimer, I work on Extism and therefore have some bias :) We have different goals than the Component Model, so if you actually want what the component model offers, you should use it!

I believe the easy solution here is to:

1. stop referring to WASI 0.1 as "legacy", implying some obsolete status, or call 0.1 something entirely different. Let it continue to be an easily targetable interface to bridge to the rest of today's software.

2. move WASI and Component Model code repositories out of the WebAssembly github org.

This would clarify the distinction between WebAssembly (the standard) and WASI 0.2 / WIT / CM as a project by Bytecode Alliance. They are not the same, and while the Bytecode Alliance works on making things usable and ready, it doesn't cause harm or confusion for WebAssembly users.

[0]: https://github.com/extism/extism

I'm looking forward to use: https://github.com/extism/extism

Extism can be really useful for packaging up and running cross-language libraries!

The most clear information about it is at: https://extism.org, but its a bit focused on the primary use case for Extism, being a universal plugin system.

There is a C PDK (https://github.com/extism/c-pdk) which you'd probably want to use in a new wrapper around your library in C++, and compile it to wasm32 freestanding or WASI, but without emscripten. Extism doesn't currently have an interop layer to emscripten.

It may just be my own unique obsession to peek at the internals of .wasm, but if anyone else is curious:

https://modsurfer.dylibso.com/module?hash=ab6f4b2de9db171347...

u/nbittich - curious if you've tried to use your language as as a scripting language inside other apps? I took a peak at your browser wasm environment, and think we could hook up the `compute` entrypoint you have here[0], but I'm not certain what the `ctx` does without going super deep, and if it could be passed into an Extism function[1] (which is how I'd try to run it from within 16+ other languages).

[0]: https://github.com/nbittich/adana/blob/master/adana-script-w...

[1]: https://github.com/extism/extism

Yep, this is one of the initial motivations for creating Extism: https://github.com/extism/extism -- and it works across 16 host languages & 8 guest languages.

On the devx, there's definitely some rough edges around building and using Wasm. My company has been working on a framework to ease integrating Wasm into existing applications. One area it focuses on is providing easy data passing between the host program and the Wasm and vice versa. https://github.com/extism/extism We do not have WASI preview 2 support yet, but are interested in integrating it.

> WASI-Preview2's benefits are not going to be realized in a browser, it's more for the non-web world

The jco project (https://github.com/BytecodeAlliance/jco) provides an implementation of the Component Model and WASI Preview 2 for JavaScript systems. Right now, node.js support is complete, but support for Web embeddings is in progress and coming soon.

> These interpreted languages can run in WASM, but only as language interpreter inside the WASM interpreter - so they work, but they are not efficient.

The Bytecode Alliance has made big improvements to SpiderMonkey performance on WASM/WASI systems, and has work in progress to take advantage of SpiderMonkey's "native" codegen targeting WASM: https://cfallin.org/blog/2023/10/11/spidermonkey-pbl/. We targeted JS first for this work because it is the most popular language with our customers and users, but we expect that this will show the path to adding similar improvements to Ruby, Python, and other languages commonly thought of as "interpreted".

I use @wasmer/wasi for my npm package `trealla` (wasm port of a Prolog interpreter). For the most part I'm pretty happy with it, but the file size is quite large[1] (taking up around half my bundle size), and it looks like @wasmer/sdk is even larger (wasmer.sh downloads a 1.7MB gzipped wasm binary that I assume is the runtime). It's a tough sell to the frontend folks when my package is this big... currently I have my eye on jco[2] which I hope will be much lighter.

[1]: https://bundlephobia.com/package/@wasmer/[email protected]

[2]: https://github.com/bytecodealliance/jco

You literally write the code in the language you prefer, and given the toolchain is in place -and it's in (experimental or preview) place for JavaScript, with teams working on it, like for example JCO- you can compile with Wasm as target.

The roadmap I linked above. The WASI folks have done a poor job at communicating, no doubt, but I'm surprised someone like yourself literally building a competitor spec isn't following what they are doing closely.

Just for you I did some googling: see here[0] for the current status of WASI threads overall, or here[1] and here[2] for what they are up to with WASI in general. In this PR[3] you can see they enabled threads (atomic instructions and shared memory, not thread creation) by default in wasmtime. And in this[4] repository you can see they are actively developing the thread creation API and have it as their #1 priority.

If folks want to use WASIX as a quick and dirty hack to compile existing programs, then by all means, have at it! I can see that being a technical win. Just know that your WASIX program isn't going to run natively in wasmtime (arguably the best WASM runtime today), nor will it run in browsers, because they're not going to expose WASIX - they're going to go with the standards instead. so far you're the only person I've met that thinks exposing POSIX fork() to WASM is a good idea, seemingly because it just lets you build existing apps 'without modification'.

Comical you accuse me of being polarizing, while pushing for your world with two competing WASI standards, two competing thread creation APIs, and a split WASM ecosystem overall.

[0] https://github.com/bytecodealliance/jco/issues/247#issuecomm...

[1] https://bytecodealliance.org/articles/wasmtime-and-cranelift...

[2] https://bytecodealliance.org/articles/webassembly-the-update...

[3] https://github.com/bytecodealliance/wasmtime/pull/7285

[4] https://github.com/WebAssembly/shared-everything-threads

The component model is already shipping in Wasmtime, and will be stable for use in Node.js and in browsers via jco (https://github.com/bytecodealliance/jco) soon. WASI Preview 2 will be done in December or January, giving component model users a stable set of interfaces to use for scheduling, streams, and higher level functionality like stdio, filesystem, sockets, and http on an opt-in basis. You should look at wit-bindgen (https://github.com/bytecodealliance/wit-bindgen) to see some of the languages currently supported, and more that will be mature enough to use very soon (https://github.com/bytecodealliance/componentize-py)

Right now jco will automatically generate the JS glue code which implements a Component Model runtime on top of the JS engine's existing WebAssembly implementation. So, yes, Components are a composition of Wasm Modules and JS code is handling passing values from one module/instance to another. You still get the performance benefits of running computation in Wasm.

One day further down the standardization road, we would like to see Web engines ship a native implementation of the Component Model, which might be able to make certain optimizations that the JS implementation cannot. Until then you can consider jco a polyfill for a native implementation, and it still gives you the power to compose isolated programs written in many languages and run them in many different contexts, including the Web.

(Disclosure: I am co-chair of WASI, Wasmtime maintainer, implemented many parts of WASI/CM)

(As a side note for the JS support — adapting QuickJS has been extremely helpful in getting JS support out; however, we are in the process of rebuilding the JS runtime using SpiderMonkey (with which a few people on the team have significant experience) and JCO (https://github.com/bytecodealliance/jco), and the web platform compatibility makes it a significantly better proposition for things like 3rd party dependencies).

C# is an interesting one — the .NET team at Microsoft (and in particular Steve Sanderson from that team) has been making tremendous progress in ahead-of-time compilation for .NET and generating Wasm and WASI compatible binaries (as opposed to their initial approach on Blazor), and experimenting with that led us to build support for Spin as well.

Finally, we do a lot to support other popular languages and their Wasm support — two examples: Python (https://github.com/bytecodealliance/componentize-py) and Java / TeaVM (https://github.com/fermyon/teavm-wasi), for which we haven't fully integrated Spin support, but we hope to get there soon.

I hope this explains a bit our process on language support, happy to expand on any point here.

That's really useful. This page in particular: https://github.com/bytecodealliance/jco/blob/main/EXAMPLE.md

Being able to run "jco wit cowsay.wasm" to see what interfaces that .wasm file provides solves a problem I've run into a bunch of times in the past.