ITK VS WASI

Compare ITK vs WASI and see what are their differences.

ITK

Insight Toolkit (ITK) -- Official Repository. ITK builds on a proven, spatially-oriented architecture for processing, segmentation, and registration of scientific images in two, three, or more dimensions. (by InsightSoftwareConsortium)

WASI

WebAssembly System Interface (by WebAssembly)
Our great sponsors
  • InfluxDB - Power Real-Time Data Analytics at Scale
  • WorkOS - The modern identity platform for B2B SaaS
  • SaaSHub - Software Alternatives and Reviews
ITK WASI
7 45
1,332 4,513
1.9% 3.1%
9.8 7.0
1 day ago 23 days ago
C++ Rust
Apache License 2.0 GNU General Public License v3.0 or later
The number of mentions indicates the total number of mentions that we've tracked plus the number of user suggested alternatives.
Stars - the number of stars that a project has on GitHub. Growth - month over month growth in stars.
Activity is a relative number indicating how actively a project is being developed. Recent commits have higher weight than older ones.
For example, an activity of 9.0 indicates that a project is amongst the top 10% of the most actively developed projects that we are tracking.

ITK

Posts with mentions or reviews of ITK. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2023-02-10.
  • Create Elegant C++ Spatial Processing Pipelines in WebAssembly
    8 projects | dev.to | 10 Feb 2023
    The itkImage.h header is ITK's standard n-dimensional image data structure.
  • Welcome and guide first-time contributors with a GitHub Action
    2 projects | dev.to | 12 Jan 2023
    In this post, we review how the Insight Toolkit (ITK) leverages the first-interaction GitHub Action to communicate our appreciation of the efforts of first-time contributors, establish norms for behavior, and provide civil pointers on where to find more information.
    2 projects | dev.to | 12 Jan 2023
    Our comment starts with a note of welcome to the community and gratitude for the effort made to contribute back to the project. Software development, regardless of the cold and mechanical nature of computers, is a social endeavor; we respect and acknowledge this by beginning with our gratitude.
  • How to raise the quality of scientific Jupyter notebooks
    9 projects | dev.to | 11 Jan 2023
    Jupyter has emerged as a fundamental component in artificial intelligence (AI) solution development and scientific inquiry. Jupyter notebooks are prevelant in modern education, commercial applications, and academic research. The Insight Toolkit (ITK) is an open source, cross-platform toolkit for N-dimensional processing, segmentation, and registration used to obtain quantitative insights from medical, biomicroscopy, material science, and geoscience images. The ITK community highly values scientific reproducibility and software sustainability. As a result, advanced computational methods in the toolkit have a dramatically larger impact because they can be reproducibly applied in derived research or commercial applications.
  • Ask HN: What is a cool technology to learn?
    2 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 1 Jul 2021
    Yeah, Prolog is pretty cool!

    Another technology I found interesting too learn is ITK (https://itk.org/). You need a different mindset using ITK than other image processing libraries.

    Lisp is cool as well.

    And fully homomorphic encryption.

  • Give me a starting nudge: microscopy image processing in python
    3 projects | /r/Python | 27 May 2021
    VTK is a powerful visualization package, but it's more for working with 3D FEM/CFD data. There are lots of things in there though, so it may be useful. The sister project Paraview is an application which can be used to work with data interactively. Both have great Python support. There is also ITK which is focused on with image data, like medical scans - never used it, though.

WASI

Posts with mentions or reviews of WASI. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2024-01-26.
  • WASI 0.2.0 and Why It Matters
    8 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 26 Jan 2024
    Sadly, still no Framebuffer API for WASI GUI apps (https://github.com/WebAssembly/WASI/issues/174).
    8 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 26 Jan 2024
    WASI Co-chair here. Nothing in WASI is "somehow blocked by Google", or indeed blocked by anyone at all. Graphics support in WASI hasn't been developed simply because nobody has put energy into developing graphics support in WASI.

    At the end of 2023 we counted around 40 contributors who have been working on WASI specifications and implementations: https://github.com/WebAssembly/meetings/blob/main/wasi/2023/... . That is a great growth for our project from a few years ago when that issue was filed, but as you can see from what people are working on, its all much more foundational pieces than a graphics interface. Also, if you look at who is employing those contributors, its largely vendors who are interested in WASI in the context of serverless. That doesn't mean WASI is limited to only serverless, but that has been the focus from contributors so far.

    By rolling out WASI on top of the WASM Component Model we have built a sound foundation for creating WASI proposals that support more problem domains, such as embedded systems (@mc_woods and his colleagues are helping with this), or graphics if someone is interested in putting in the work. Our guide to how to create proposals is found here: https://github.com/WebAssembly/WASI/blob/main/Contributing.m... .

  • Missing the Point of WebAssembly
    2 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 9 Jan 2024
    > As I understand it, it's not even really possible today to make WebAssembly do anything meaningful in the browser without trampolining back out to JavaScript anyway, which seems like a remarkable missed opportunity.

    That's the underlying messy API it's built on. There are specs to make the API more standardized like https://github.com/WebAssembly/WASI

    But overall, yeah, it feels like a shiny new toy everyone is excited about and wants to use. Some toys can be fun to play with, but it doesn't mean we have to rewrite production systems in it. Sometimes, or most of the time, toys don't become useful tools.

  • Running WASI binaries from your HTML using Web Components
    4 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 28 Aug 2023
    Snapshot Preview 1 is the standard all tools are building to right now. The specification is available here: https://github.com/WebAssembly/WASI/blob/main/legacy/preview...

    It's pretty unreadable though!

    Preview 2 looks like it will be a big change, and is just being finalised at the moment. I'd expect that when preview 2 is available there will be an improvement in the quality of documentation. I'm not sure how long it will take after release for tools to start switching to it. I'd expect Preview 1 will still be the main target at least for the rest of this year.

  • WASI: WebAssembly System Interface
    6 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 5 Aug 2023
    I've never seen a worse-described project than WASI.

    "Component model interfaces always support link-time interposition."

    Like WTF does this mean? The README tells me nothing. I click on docs and there's one file.

    https://github.com/WebAssembly/WASI/blob/main/docs/WitInWasi...

    Wit? Never heard of it. I click on "legacy" and I see preview0 and preview1, which are even more poorly-written specs.

    Wikipedia tells me WASI is a POXIS-like interface, but with POSIX, I know exactly where to look up the functions. Where's the WASI spec?

    I'll be honest - this whole project feels like candy for architecture astronauts and goes against the spirit of WebAssembly.

    Looks at how well-written WebAssembly's goals are: https://webassembly.org/docs/high-level-goals/. Their spec is easy to find and easy to read. This is what I want from WASM.

    Whatever WASI is doing I don't like it. And neither does AssemblyScript team for the record: https://www.assemblyscript.org/standards-objections.html.

    6 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 5 Aug 2023
    > Like WTF does this mean? The repo tells me nothing

    Directly above the sentence you quoted:

    "Interposition in the context of WASI interfaces is the ability for a Webassembly instance to implement a given WASI interface, and for a consumer WebAssembly instance to be able to use this implementation transparently. This can be used to adapt or attenuate the functionality of a WASI API without changing the code using it."

    > and I've still yet to see a clear write-up about what WASI is.

    In the same document: [0]

    > WTF is wit?

    The first link in that document ("Starting in Preview2, WASI APIs are defined using the Wit IDL.") is [1].

    > I click on "legacy" and I see preview0 and preview1, which are basically unreadable proto-specs.

    The README for the legacy directory [2] clearly explains what they are.

    > Where's a single well-written WASI spec?

    "Development of each API happens in its own repo, which you can access from the proposals list." [3]

    > Whatever WASI is doing, I don't like it.

    Clearly not - you've gone out of your way to ignore all of the documentation that answers your questions.

    > And neither does AssemblyScript team apparently

    The AssemblyScript team have a bone to pick with WASI based on their misunderstanding of what WASI is for (it is not intended for use on the web) and WASI's disinterest in supporting UTF-16 strings. You can see for yourself in [4].

    [0]: https://github.com/WebAssembly/WASI/tree/main#wasi-high-leve...

    6 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 5 Aug 2023
  • Spin 1.0 — The Developer Tool for Serverless WebAssembly
    17 projects | dev.to | 28 Mar 2023
    We are excited to contribute back to Wasmtime and the component model, as well as to new projects and proposals emerging in this space (such as new Wasm proposals, like WASI Preview 2, wasi-keyvalue, wasi-sql or wasi-cloud).
  • The Tug-of-War over Server-Side WebAssembly
    12 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 24 Mar 2023
    I've been reading the following repositories.

    https://github.com/WebAssembly/WASI/blob/main/Proposals.md

  • Create Elegant C++ Spatial Processing Pipelines in WebAssembly
    8 projects | dev.to | 10 Feb 2023
    Since that time, Emscripten's capabilities have advanced and been standardized with WebAssembly (Wasm) in the Web Platform. Moreover, Wasm's scope has expanded dramatically with the advent of the WebAssembly System Interface, WASI, and The Component Model.

What are some alternatives?

When comparing ITK and WASI you can also consider the following projects:

OpenCV - Open Source Computer Vision Library

VTK - Mirror of Visualization Toolkit repository

.NET Runtime - .NET is a cross-platform runtime for cloud, mobile, desktop, and IoT apps.

GDCM - Grassroots DICOM read-only mirror. Only for Pull Request. Please report bug at http://sf.net/p/gdcm

webgpu-wgsl-hello-triangle - An example of how to render a triangle with WebGPU using WebGPU Shading Language - the "Hello world!" of computer graphics.

tesseract-ocr - Tesseract Open Source OCR Engine (main repository)

CImg - The CImg Library is a small and open-source C++ toolkit for image processing

Flutter - Flutter makes it easy and fast to build beautiful apps for mobile and beyond

threads - Threads and Atomics in WebAssembly

wasi-libc - WASI libc implementation for WebAssembly

libvips - A fast image processing library with low memory needs.

node-sqlite3 - SQLite3 bindings for Node.js