extism VS wazero

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.

https://github.com/tetratelabs/wazero/releases/tag/v1.7.0

This includes the final release of the new optimizing compiler, which is a big improvement over the previous one.

The new version also adds experimental support for threads and snapshot/restore (setjmp/longjmp).

This is already being used by go-pgquery, all will mean that sqlc won't need to ship to almost copies of wazero (these features had been implemented on a friendly fork, and have now been up-streamed).

> Go actually has one of the best WASM runtimes https://github.com/tetratelabs/wazero

Wazero looks super cool. I saw somewhere that programs can be run with a timeout, which sounds great for sandboxing. The program input is just a slice of bytes [1], so an interesting use case would be to use something like Nats [2] to distribute programs to different servers. Super simple distributed computing!

--

1: https://github.com/tetratelabs/wazero/blob/main/examples/bas...

2: https://natsbyexample.com/examples/messaging/pub-sub/go

It is slower.

The WASM runtime wazero [1] uses a compiler on amd64 and arm64 (on Linux, macOS, Windows, and FreeBSD), but the current compiler is very fast (at compiling), but very naive (generates less than optimal code).

An optimizing compiler is currently being developed, and should be released in the coming months. I'm optimistic that this compiler will cover the performance gap between WASM and modernc.

[1]: https://wazero.io

I am a fan of the Jacobin project! For your uses, you may also want to consider wazero [1], a pure-go WebAssembly runtime. Full disclosure: I am on the team :)

[1]: https://wazero.io/

No longer does Wasm/WASI need JS host! There are many spec-compliant runtimes built for environments from tiny embedded systems up to beefy arm/x86 racks:

- https://github.com/bytecodealliance/wasm-micro-runtime

- https://github.com/bytecodealliance/wasmtime

- https://github.com/wasmerio/wasmer

- https://github.com/tetratelabs/wazero

- https://github.com/extism/extism (disclaimer, my company's project - makes wasm easily embeddable into 16+ programming languages!)

full disclosure: I don't work on it, but the devs are committers/contributors to https://wazero.io (I am a wazero committer) :)