design-principles VS stringref

I am skeptical of WebAssembly and component-model myself, but that AssemblyScript page seems alarmist and as can be seen in several issues, dcodeIO (from the AssemblyScript community) was definitely not behaving in good faith: https://github.com/w3ctag/design-principles/issues/322

It seems most of the complaints are that selecting UTF-8 as a primary string encoding is "against the practices of the web", which seems patently absurd. I was definitely expecting more along the lines of object models integrating into component‐model, rather than mass-tagging people because of string encodings.

I don't agree with your representation that sanitisation of isolated surrogates constitutes "corruption". As a high-level point, when passing a string from your component to an external one, the external component receives a sanitised copy of your string - the original string is not modified in-place. So you still have access to your original string if you're relying on the presence of isolated surrogates for some reason.

For fairness, I will link below to your concrete example of "corruption", noting that you claim it will render Wasm "the biggest security disaster man ever created for everything". The fundamental bug is in splitting a string at a point which happens to be between two code points which make up an emoji. This kind of mistake can already cause logic and display errors in other parts of the code (e.g. for languages with non-BMP characters) independent of whether components are involved.

https://github.com/w3ctag/design-principles/issues/322

The idea of Wasm as a universal plugin system is very promising. But string passing is maybe not the best example to highlight, considering that Wasm is introducing stringref to enable zero-copy string sharing between the Wasm runtime and host language.

https://github.com/WebAssembly/stringref/blob/main/proposals...

> dcodeIO (from the AssemblyScript community) was definitely not behaving in good faith

I certainly disagree with that take. I only see one person being frustrated because his concerns were being thrown under the rug as "non important", I would recommend you to read on dcode's blog to learn more about how the timeline happened [1]. There are always things to improve regarding how we communicate, of course, but those should not be used as a weapon to attack or dismiss someone but as means to improve.

It's also important to note that a few months after, the Wasm committee realized of the mistake and actually tried to solve it with the Wasm Stringref proposal [2].

The issue is not about if using UTF-8 or UTF-16 is the way to go, but how disagreement is being handled in what's supposed to be an open community

[1] https://dcode.io/#webassembly

[2] https://github.com/WebAssembly/stringref