botnet VS temporal-polyfill

I was/am working on a project (https://github.com/JMS55/botnet), where users upload scripts compiled to WASM to control entities on a game server, so that they can write custom behavior.

Never heard of extism before, but second using WASM for plugins/scripting/extensions. I'm using it for botnet(1). Each player uploads a WASM program to control their bots. Both the server and the bot SDK are written in Rust, and can share some code.

4. Speed

I'm hoping to write my thesis for my master's degree on this topic this year. I'm also in the process of writing a game like screeps, where users provide a WASM script to control units for an RTS-style game (without combat though) https://github.com/JMS55/botnet.

It's amazing how simple it is to constrain memory usage, runtime duration, and secure exported functions to a WASM VM. Performance is also great - currently about ~6 microseconds per tick per unit, up to ~200 microseconds when doing expensive pathfinding. All that, while letting you program your units in Rust - the same language as the server is written in, while being able to share code with the server, and not having to use something more script-y like lua.

The boilerplate sucks, but it works well when you don't need a ton of different functions. I use wasm as a scripting language for running isolated untrusted scripts in a game I'm developing, and it works really well https://github.com/JMS55/botnet.

I'm working on a Screeps-like game using WebAssembly. You compile a script to WebAssembly, and for each robot you control on the server, it runs the script in an isolated environment to choose an action for that robot. The goal is to write a program to coordinate your robots to gather resources and expand your control of the server.

Here's an example bot script: https://github.com/JMS55/botnet/blob/master/example_bot/src/...

The basic infrastructure of the project is more or less in place, besides a visual replay viewer which I'm working on right now. What's needed is a bunch of work in designing game mechanics and APIs. I don't actually have any plans beyond bots running around and harvesting randomly generated resources at the moment. Feel free to open a discussion on the github page if you're interested in Rust, WebAssembly, and video games.

https://github.com/JMS55/botnet

There's another, much smaller polyfill: https://github.com/fullcalendar/temporal

This assumes two things though, and this is another point I just realized about WASM that I like, which is for (most) modern browsers asm.js / WASM doesn't have to be polyfilled, therefore with Temporal we have to consider the following:

1. Browser support - its not there yet. you'd have to polyfill. A production level polyfill is 16 KB, and is still very nasacent, and, on top of that, requires support also for BigInt[0]. The polyfill that tc39 put out is decidedly marked as non-production ready[1].

2. Polyfilling - as mentioned above, we have to deal with polyfilling the API, and that isn't a clear and easy story yet. WASM support goes back farther than this.

3. Size - its entirely possible to get WASM builds under 16 KB, and the support is better, espcially for operations on strings and numbers (dates fit this category well). The only complication I haven't quite solved yet is:

A) Can I validate that a WASM build will be under 16 KB. This is crucial. I'd even accept it at 20 KB because of wider browser support[2]

B) Can I fall back to asm.js if needed (there is a slim range of browsers that support ASM.js but not WASM, mostly pre-chromium Edge[3]

C) Is it performant compared to something like Luxon or date-fns? WASM excels at string / numerical operations so my sneaking suspicion is yes, at least in terms of the WASM operations. The complexity will be serializing the operations to a JS Date instance, Luxon & the Intl API might be most useful here

[0]: https://github.com/fullcalendar/temporal/blob/main/packages/...

[1]: https://github.com/tc39/proposal-temporal#polyfills

[2]: https://caniuse.com/wasm

[3]: https://caniuse.com/asmjs