component-model VS wasi-sdk

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

I would really love being able to take any POSIX command line tool, compile that to WASI, and run it on (at least) Linux, Windows and macOS like a regular executable without having to install a separate WASI runtime.

I'm a 'WASI convert' since I was able to take an ancient 8-bit assembler written in the mid-90's (http://xi6.com/projects/asmx/), compile that as-is with the WASI SDK (https://github.com/WebAssembly/wasi-sdk), and then integrate it into a VSCode extension (https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=floooh.v...).

A similar problem is I have is a shader cross-compiler (https://github.com/floooh/sokol-tools) which needs to run Linux, macOS and Windows and takes too long to build locally, thus I currently need to distribute that as pre-built binaries. Compiling this to WASI works, but the filesystem access restrictions built into current wasm runtimes are a hassle to manage, and it would require a WASI runtime to be separately installed).

There is the WASI SDK if you want to target WASI from C/C++:

https://github.com/WebAssembly/wasi-sdk

It may not have all the amenities of Emscripten, but it's way less bulky.

The most direct way to debug WebAssembly is through the WebAssembly System Interface (WASI). In itk-wasm, we can build to WASI with the WASI SDK by specifying the itkwasm/wasi toolchain image. A backtrace can quickly be obtained with the itk-wasm CLI. Or, a fully fledged debugger session can be started with LLDB.

We use the add_executable command to build executables with itk-wasm. The Emscripten and WASI toolchains along with itk-wasm build and execution configurations are contained in itk-wasm dockcross Docker images invoked by the itk-wasm command line interface (CLI). Note that the same code can also be built and tested with native operating system toolchains. This is useful for development and debugging.

A more lightweight tool than emscripten is the WASI SDK (https://github.com/WebAssembly/wasi-sdk/releases). However, it doesn't generate JS or HTML.

wget https://github.com/WebAssembly/wasi-sdk/releases/download/wasi-sdk-16/wasi-sdk-16.0-macos.tar.gz

First, we’ll download the wasi-sdk. We’ll use wasi-sdk-16.0-linux.tar.gz, the latest version available when writing this article. We’ll move the file to the /opt directory and unpack it as follows:

I'm intrigued. Pretty good write-up about it here. One would need an ebuild for wasi-libc and an ebuild for wasi-sdk.

The previously mentioned PR for wasm32-unknown-unknown compatibility solved this by including libc .c files from OpenBSD. My go to solution is different though. I prefer to build using the wasi-sdk (a WASI-enabled WebAssembly C/C++ toolchain).

There's also the https://github.com/WebAssembly/wasi-sdk repo which is kind of a meta-build-system for all this.

But in FreeBSD we build all the pieces directly, here's our build recipes (with some hacks due to llvm's cmake code being stupid sometimes):

compiler-rt (from llvm): https://github.com/freebsd/freebsd-ports/blob/main/devel/was...

libc (from what you linked): https://github.com/freebsd/freebsd-ports/blob/main/devel/was...

libc++ (from llvm): https://github.com/freebsd/freebsd-ports/blob/main/devel/was...