ic VS threads

Internet Computer blockchain (ICP) — a general-purpose blockchain system developed by the DFINITY Foundation (written in Rust);

Yes, non-rust dependencies can be a pain. We addressed this issue in three ways: 1. Sometimes, it just works™ if the crate has a copy of the C code and uses the cc crate to compile it. It's usually slow to compile C in a build script, but it works. 2. Sometimes, we write a custom BUILD script for direct dependencies and link external libraries by hand. Example: lmdb and lmdb-sys. 3. If all of the above is not an option or is too much work, we add a native library to the Docker container that runs our builds.

One thing that sticks out to me is that, while their code is open source, it has a restrictive license, the Apache License: https://github.com/dfinity/ic/blob/master/LICENSE - most open source projects opt for the MIT License.

Sources please? https://github.com/dfinity/ic/pulse talks of only ~100 commits (IC only, not including the other repos)

https://github.com/dfinity/ic/graphs/contributors You can see there are many contributors, whose own GitHub profiles show contributions to OTHER projects. For example, just clicking on one contributor, John Wiegley (Principal Engineer at DFINITY), you will see a long history of open source contributions: https://github.com/jwiegley

You can see the code here: https://github.com/dfinity/ic

Similarly for threads: https://github.com/webassembly/threads

Specifically I submitted this to draw attention to the latest comment in the thread: https://github.com/WebAssembly/threads/issues/177

It's a good deep dive into how a small, but well-intentioned, browser choice nearly a decade ago led to poor outcomes for the WebAssembly ecosystem.

The answer is: it's complicated. Which is most of the time the answer in the WASI world.

For this case it's complicated because some runtime supports https://github.com/WebAssembly/threads which mostly contains things like the spec for atomic but not the actual "threads" specs and then some runtimes (i.e wasmtime) also supports https://github.com/WebAssembly/wasi-threads which is one version of the threads. But a new proposal came into play https://github.com/abrown/thread-spawn so ... it's complicated.

There’s a proposal for threads

WebAssembly is having/going to have threads

https://github.com/WebAssembly/threads

It's disappointing to see the WebAssembly/threads proposal is still only in proposal state, despite existing since 2018. It being just a proposal stops languages like golang from actually implementing support for it, despite Chrome supporting it since v70.

Ah, I should have clarified that I mean the assembly instructions for atomics, rather than the JavaScript API. I.e. the opcodes listed here: https://github.com/WebAssembly/threads/blob/master/proposals...

Another point to add here is that the current wasm specification does not support threads although there is a proposal to add one. So I imagine that till the wasm specification includes it, we will continue to have only single threaded canisters.