hippo VS yeoman

WebAssembly (Wasm) is something that the Cloud Native Advocacy team has been exploring. It has been around for a few years and has mostly been used within browser-based applications. There are many blog posts on what makes WebAssembly an ideal target for running applications (e.g., smaller footprint with .wasm files compared to containers, code isolation, and sandboxing). My colleague Steven Murawski wrote a blog series on getting started with hosting Wasm apps on an emerging PaaS platform called Hippo which is developed by folks at Fermyon. In Part 1 of the series, he introduces topics and define some of the acronyms like "Wagi" and "WASI". He also introduced a runtime called Wasmtime which implements the WebAssembly System Interface (WASI) standard. This article will walk you through how Steven and I went about getting a .NET console app running as a Wasm app on the Wasmtime runtime in a Dev Container. The .NET console app produced in this article has also been contributed as a csharp template in the yo-wasm repo which is also maintained by Fermyon; so you can quickly test it out for yourself later.

Tools like yeoman, degit, and cargo generate kept me happy for years. They add basic templating capabilities to the standard git clone but they stop there. You’ll be hard pressed to find tools that go beyond setting up a directory structure.

Yeoman

I don't follow. What you're describing sounds like something akin to either Yeoman or UltiSnips and output-only tools like that don't need to care about whether two pieces of code are semantically equivalent.

Getting back to Wasm and the yo-wasm repo. This repo exists to help you easily create Wasm modules which can be published to OCI registries. The yo-wasm project currently supports publishing to either Azure Container Registry or Hippo and uses Yeoman to generate projects based on templates that are defined in this repo. There are templates for Assembly Script, C, Rust, Swift, and TinyGo. We've added a new template for C#, so let's give it a try.

This happened recently when writing a Yeoman generator to quickly scaffold new projects. I wanted to write something like expect(result).toHaveDevDependency("typescript") to assert that the package.json file generated with the project includes a specified package in its devDependencies.

You can find a few good generators for Yeoman https://yeoman.io/

Yeoman

Hi! Good project you have here! What is your main focus fot it? Being some kind of uber-generator like http://yeoman.io/ or becoming a hosting platform? Case the latter, is on-premise PaaS in the roadmap?

There are a lot of generators/scaffolding tools that can generate a base for you, whether that is the actual structure you want or not can vary a lot, but many of them have quite sensible defaults. It's often a architectural decision how you actually want to structure your code, and isn't really a one side fits all thing. One generator i have used and a lot of the templates there have pretty close to production quality setup (obviously you could always argue about personal preferences and what serves the project in question) is https://yeoman.io/ . It's web focused, but paradigms vary so much between different kinds of development it's pretty impossible to create something that could serve all of them.