component-model VS spin

I don't think that's a very good goal. Jettisoning the DOM means jettisoning accessibility and being able to leverage everything that the browser gives you out-of-the-box. You have to render to a canvas and build everything from scratch. I think Wasm is great for supplementing a JS app, not replacing it (e.g. using a Wasm module to do some calculations in a Worker). I like to use the right tool for the job, and trying to use something other than JS to build a web app just seems a little janky to me.

At one point, there was a Host Bindings proposal that would enable you to do DOM manipulation (it looks like it was archived and moved to the Component Model spec [1]). That would probably be the ideal way to avoid as much JS as possible. However, browser vendors have been heavily optimizing their JS runtimes, and in some cases, Wasm may actually be slower than JS.

I've been following Wasm's progress for several years, which has been slow, but steady. Ironically, I think the web is actually the worst place to use it. There's so much cool non-web stuff being done with it and I'm more interested to see where that goes.

[1] https://github.com/WebAssembly/component-model?tab=readme-ov...

Well the great thing about WebAssembly is that you can port QT or anything else to be at a layer below -- thanks to WebAssembly Interface Types[0] and the Component Model specification that works underneath that.

To over-simplify, the Component Model manages language interop, and WIT constrains the boundaries with interfaces.

IMO the problem here is defining a 90% solution for most window, tab, button, etc management, then building embeddings in QT, Flutter/Skia, and other lower level engines. Getting a good cross-platform way of doing data passing, triggering re-renders, serializing window state is probably the meat of the interesting work.

On top of that, you really need great UX. This is normally where projects fall short -- why should I use this solution instead of something like Tauri[2] which is excellent or Electron?

[0]: https://github.com/WebAssembly/component-model/blob/main/des...

[1]: https://github.com/WebAssembly/component-model/blob/main/des...

[2]: https://tauri.app/

While I don't necessarily agree with the unnecessary, unsupported casual, & cheap contempt culture here ("unshackle the web from the mess that is JavaScript", "places that don't really need these problems to be solved")...

WebAssembly component-model is being developed to allow referring to and passing complex objects between different modules and the outside world, by establishing WebAssembly Interface Types (WIT). It's basically a ABI layer for wasm. This is a pre-requisite for host-object bridging, bringing in things like DOM elements.

Long running effort, but it's hard work and there's just not that many hands available for this deep work. Some assorted links with more: https://github.com/WebAssembly/component-model https://www.fermyon.com/blog/webassembly-component-model https://thenewstack.io/can-webassembly-get-its-act-together-...

It's just hard work, it's happening. And I think the advantages Andy talks to here illuminate very real reasons why this tech can be useful broadly. The ability to have plugins to a system that can be safely sandboxed is a huge win. That it's in any language allows much wider ecosystem of interests to participate, versus everyone interested in extending your work also having to be a java or c++ or rust developer.

A. Sure, but it isn't sufficiently beneficial for the cost.

B. WebAssembly is immature for developing a plugin system because of the lack of a sufficient ABI: https://github.com/WebAssembly/component-model

C. There aren't any other languages that meet the criteria. Lua was a no-go from the start. The maintainers did not like the language, and it necessitated adding more C code to Helix which could complicate building even further. https://github.com/helix-editor/helix/discussions/3806#discu...

AFAIK GC is irrelevant for "direct DOM access", you would rather want to hop into the following rabbit hole:

- reference types: https://github.com/WebAssembly/reference-types/blob/master/p...

- interface types (inactive): https://github.com/WebAssembly/interface-types/blob/main/pro...

- component model: https://github.com/WebAssembly/component-model

If this looks like a mess, that's because it is. Compared to that, the current solution to go through a Javascript shim doesn't look too bad IMHO.

The wasm idl (called WIT) is actively being worked on here: https://github.com/WebAssembly/component-model/blob/main/des...

Being able to access DOM is definitely an objective. It's just taking a lot longer than folks guessed to build a modular wasm ABI.

The WASM Component Model

https://github.com/WebAssembly/component-model

Take a look at the python abi to see what the structure looks like for calling into components https://github.com/WebAssembly/component-model/tree/main/design/mvp/canonical-abi

Thanks for your valuable comments. Yes. the wasm provides the linear memory and mlang will adopt Canonical ABI on top of that to implement high level types like string, record and variant etc.

We built (and open-sourced) Spin to make the developer experience easier, and we want to show you this through Fermyon's Advent of Spin. You will be presented with fun coding challenges that'll help you learn to build with Spin and WebAssembly.

linky: https://github.com/fermyon/spin#readme (Apache 2; and while I don't see any CLA, interestingly they do require GPG signed commits: https://developer.fermyon.com/spin/contributing-spin#committ... )

We are delighted to introduce Spin 1.0, the first stable release of the open source developer tool for building serverless applications with WebAssembly (Wasm)! Since we first introduced Spin last year, we have been hard at work together with the community on building a frictionless developer experience for building and running serverless applications with Wasm.

“Waggy is used for writing WAGI (WebAssembly Gateway Interface) compliant API routers/individual handlers. WAGI was developed by deislabs for accepting and routing incoming HTTP requests with WebAssembly via a configuration file (modules.toml) defining routes, modules, volumes to be mounted, etc. WAGI can run as a stand alone server, or with a framework such as the Fermyon/Spin framework Go SDK. Waggy allows for the flexibility of handling the routing via the modules.toml, or to define it code (Waggy is written in Go), as well as various pieces of convenient functionality such as the new features described above!!”

Waggy v0.3 is out now!! Along with some minor bug fixes, v0.3 comes with two major improvements, being the ability to configure loggers for WaggyRouters and WaggyHandlers alike, as well as a convenience wrapper for serving files as responses. One other big unplanned, but welcome improvement is the ability to use Waggy in conjunction with Fermyon’s Spin Go SDK for writing WAGI microservices that can also make outgoing HTTP calls.

They’re VC-funded and will vendor lock-in you. See their response to my discussion:

https://github.com/fermyon/spin/discussions/861

With WasmEdge there is no vendor lock-in, it’s opaque and standards-based

Webassembly is also gaining steam for server workloads due to several advantages (less overhead, better capability based security, composability, ...).

See Spin [1], Wasmcloud [2], Lunatic [3], etc.

My system is based on a distributed Webassembly runtime.

The reason for taking inspiration from Kubernetes is making deployment of distributed workloads on that runtime easy.

A nice benefit for a Kubernetes alike system is that the equivalent to controllers can be much more light-weight WASM actors that are easier to deploy and scale.

[1] https://github.com/fermyon/spin

[2] https://github.com/wasmCloud/wasmCloud

[3] https://github.com/lunatic-solutions/lunatic

(one of the authors of Spin here.)

First, both Spin and the component model are in their early stages, but there are a few things I'd mention here:

- as you correctly pointed out, all "trigger" interfaces are based on WIT (https://github.com/bytecodealliance/wit-bindgen/blob/main/WI...), the new WebAssembly interface format, so a) building a WebAssembly binary that implements a trigger interface can be done pretty easily in languages with bindgen support, and b) extending Spin with a new trigger type can also be done by starting with the WIT interface (really early on this topic, but here's an example — https://spin.fermyon.dev/extending-and-embedding/)

- we want to add support for defining component dependencies, and dynamically linking them at runtime based on the environment.

- all "platform features" we want want to add to Spin will be initially based on host implementations for WebAssembly interfaces (you can see an early example of this in this PR — https://github.com/fermyon/spin/pull/165)

- we are closely following the tooling in the component model (https://github.com/bytecodealliance/wit-bindgen/pull/183) and will add support for natively executing actual components once that is available upstream.

Hope this is helpful!

(one of the authors of Spin here.)

WIth the disclaimer that this is really early, and we don't have extensive benchmarks yet, there are a few things we are tracking for HTTP workloads (you can see the actual benchmark apps here — https://github.com/fermyon/spin/tree/main/crates/http/benche..., and the rendered results here — https://fermyon.github.io/spin-benchmarks/criterion/reports/):

- the response times — here are some benchmarks for requests that simulate 1 ms of work — https://fermyon.github.io/spin-benchmarks/criterion/reports/...