extism VS wasm-bindgen

Extism can be really useful for packaging up and running cross-language libraries!

The most clear information about it is at: https://extism.org, but its a bit focused on the primary use case for Extism, being a universal plugin system.

There is a C PDK (https://github.com/extism/c-pdk) which you'd probably want to use in a new wrapper around your library in C++, and compile it to wasm32 freestanding or WASI, but without emscripten. Extism doesn't currently have an interop layer to emscripten.

It may just be my own unique obsession to peek at the internals of .wasm, but if anyone else is curious:

https://modsurfer.dylibso.com/module?hash=ab6f4b2de9db171347...

u/nbittich - curious if you've tried to use your language as as a scripting language inside other apps? I took a peak at your browser wasm environment, and think we could hook up the `compute` entrypoint you have here[0], but I'm not certain what the `ctx` does without going super deep, and if it could be passed into an Extism function[1] (which is how I'd try to run it from within 16+ other languages).

[0]: https://github.com/nbittich/adana/blob/master/adana-script-w...

[1]: https://github.com/extism/extism

Yep, this is one of the initial motivations for creating Extism: https://github.com/extism/extism -- and it works across 16 host languages & 8 guest languages.

On the devx, there's definitely some rough edges around building and using Wasm. My company has been working on a framework to ease integrating Wasm into existing applications. One area it focuses on is providing easy data passing between the host program and the Wasm and vice versa. https://github.com/extism/extism We do not have WASI preview 2 support yet, but are interested in integrating it.

Another strange issue could be seen in the strict class heritage organized definition of the DOM, which can not be handled very well by rust because of a still unsolved bindgen issue (#210).

For a much simpler but less flexible approach there's wasm-pack for creating JS packages from Rust, and wasm-bindgen for easy interop. Both have very good documentation.

We encountered quite a few hurdles on our journey. For one, we had to build our own yew-webtransport and yew-websocket integration from scratch by adding WebTransport definitions to wasm-bindgen (pull request link). We also had to add WebTransport support to the h3 crate (pull request link). co-created by @ten3roberts

Go with your WebAssembly module idea. Since it sounds like your chess engine does not draw a UI, it shouldn't be too difficult. wasm-bindgen will be your best friend.

I've never tried it, but apparently some bindings exist, e.g. https://github.com/rustwasm/wasm-bindgen

So you can either try manipulating the DOM w/ some bindings or draw to canvas.

Google also brings up this GitHub issue.

If you want to learn more on wasm-pack, there is a wasm-pack book as well as some fairly detailed wasm-bindgen docs. There are a few resources for learning Rust itself in the December newsletter. Finally, please get in touch if you would like to see more content on Deno and Fresh. I hope you found the content useful and am keen to hear about possible improvements.

Love the article.

In my mind I see the problem of dynamic linking in rust to have a bunch of overlap with the "I want this rust library to be exposed in my higher level GC'd language with minimal safety/handwritten bindings" problem.

My hunch is that the lack of expressiveness of the C ABI is holding back both. the thing I'd love to see some sort of "higher level than the C ABI" come out. And something like `wasm-bindgen`[0] to exist for more languages.

Here's a link to the rust "interopable_api" proposal! I don't understand all the implications, but it seems to be in the right direction https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/pull/105586

[0]https://rustwasm.github.io/docs/wasm-bindgen/

Rust has https://github.com/rustwasm/wasm-bindgen and https://crates.io/crates/sledgehammer, the latter of which batches together JS calls to reduce the FFI cost. https://dioxuslabs.com/ uses these to great effect.

This seems like it could be super useful for integrating with wasm-bindgen and TypeScript. Last I checked, the types generated by wasm-bindgen left a lot to be desired (no disrespect intended, wasm-bindgen is an awesome project). A few years ago, I contributed the skip_typescript attribute to wasm_bindgen that allowed you to override the type generation by hand-writing your own types (using a custom typescript section), but I wonder if this could simply generate higher quality types without the manual intervention.