WASI VS wasm-micro-runtime

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... .

> 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.

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.

> 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...

The Bytecode Alliance initiated a sub-project called the WebAssembly System Interface (WASI). WASI is an API that allows WebAssembly access to system features such as files, filesystems, Berkeley sockets, clocks, and random numbers. WASI acts as a system-level interface for WebAssembly, so incorporating a runtime into a host environment and building a platform is easier.

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).

I've been reading the following repositories.

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

Here is what you are looking for: https://github.com/bytecodealliance/wasm-micro-runtime

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!)

The WASM core 1.1 infrastructure is already available in a very strict defined more or less guarantied compatible form on nearly any final target. Even on very small devices for embedded computing (WAMR takes less then 85kB and supports even trusted computing etc.) and in contexts, where usually no other low level development tools are available (for example within the context of Webbrowsers, sandboxed execution etc.)

WAMR and it's different AoT preprocessing and execution modes could be even more efficient. ;)

Wasm-bpf is a WebAssembly eBPF library, toolchain and runtime powered by CO-RE(Compile Once – Run Everywhere) libbpf and WAMR. It can help you build almost every eBPF programs or use cases to Wasm.

Running a Wasm application outside the browser requires an appropriate runtime that implements the WebAssembly VM and provides interfaces to the underlying system. There are a few competing solutions in this field, the most popular being wasmtime, wasmer, and WAMR.

A very interesting solution for high level interface access by less professional developers could be seen in pikascript, which works even on very small devices. WAMR is another project with similar capabilities. Both of them can be very well combined with core infrastructure realized as embedded rust code.

Seems the micro runtime also released 1.0:

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

But why does it not have binaries compiled and ready?