meetings VS WASI

WASI Co-chair here. Nothing in WASI is "somehow blocked by Google", or indeed blocked by anyone at all. Graphics support in WASI hasn't been developed simply because nobody has put energy into developing graphics support in WASI.

At the end of 2023 we counted around 40 contributors who have been working on WASI specifications and implementations: https://github.com/WebAssembly/meetings/blob/main/wasi/2023/... . That is a great growth for our project from a few years ago when that issue was filed, but as you can see from what people are working on, its all much more foundational pieces than a graphics interface. Also, if you look at who is employing those contributors, its largely vendors who are interested in WASI in the context of serverless. That doesn't mean WASI is limited to only serverless, but that has been the focus from contributors so far.

By rolling out WASI on top of the WASM Component Model we have built a sound foundation for creating WASI proposals that support more problem domains, such as embedded systems (@mc_woods and his colleagues are helping with this), or graphics if someone is interested in putting in the work. Our guide to how to create proposals is found here: https://github.com/WebAssembly/WASI/blob/main/Contributing.m... .

For me, the huge missing link (that is fortunately being worked on!) is being able to (in a performant way) have a good answer for "host code wants to do some blocking operation, WASM should suspend during the operation".

This _should_ be gotten thanks to work on stack switching in WASM. As of the most recent working group meeting on this [0], it seems like V8 has made a good amount of progress on this. They published a thing back in January[1] on this, and hopefully if things go well and this is available across WASM engines then there will be one less "JS-ism" (everything async) that causes issues for transpilation.

[0]: https://github.com/WebAssembly/meetings/blob/main/stack/2023...

[1]: https://v8.dev/blog/jspi

> Whereas the later has only been around since 2015 and was created by a company that subsists off an agreement with a deviant online advertising company.

Mozilla created a precursor technology, but I thought Wasm was developed via the W3C standards process from the start. From the notes of the first meeting, you can see attendees from Adobe, Apple, ARM, Autodesk, Google, Intel, Mozilla, Stanford, and more.

https://github.com/WebAssembly/meetings/blob/main/main/2017/...

Additionally, Wasm has been a W3C standard since 2019.

A bunch of packages like tokio don't work because they transitively depend on net, and WASI doesn't have networking yet (networking is in phase 1 of 5), and it doesn't seem possible to turn off the net feature of transitive dependencies

I think SIMD was a distraction to our conversation, most code doesn't use it and in the future the length agnostic, flexible vectors; https://github.com/WebAssembly/flexible-vectors/blob/master/... are a better solution. They are a lot like RVV; https://github.com/riscv/riscv-v-spec, research around vector processing is why RISC-V exists in the first place!

I was trying to find the smallest Rust Wasm interpreters I could find, I should have read the source first, I only really use wasmtime, but this one looks very interesting, zero deps, zero unsafe.

16.5kloc of Rust https://github.com/rhysd/wain

The most complete wasm env for small devices is wasm3

20kloc of C https://github.com/wasm3/wasm3

I get what you are saying as to be so small that there isn't a place of bugs to hide.

> “There are two ways of constructing a software design: One way is to make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies, and the other way is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies. The first method is far more difficult.” CAR Hoare

Even a 100 line program can't be guaranteed to be free of bugs. These programs need embedded tests to ensure that the layer below them is functioning as intended. They cannot and should not run open loop. Speaking of 300+ reimplementations, I am sure that RISC-V has already exceeded that. The smallest readable implementation is like 200 lines of code; https://github.com/BrunoLevy/learn-fpga/blob/master/FemtoRV/...

I don't think Wasm suffers from the base extension issue you bring up. It will get larger, but 1.0 has the right algebraic properties to be useful forever. Wasm does require an environment, for archival purposes that environment should be written in Wasm, with api for instantiating more envs passed into the first env. There are two solutions to the Wasm generating and calling Wasm problem. First would be a trampoline, where one returns Wasm from the first Wasm program which is then re-instantiated by the outer env. The other would be to pass in the api to create new Wasm envs over existing memory buffers.

See, https://copy.sh/v86/

MS-DOS, NES or C64 are useful for archival purposes because they are dead, frozen in time along with a large corpus of software. But there is a ton of complexity in implementing those systems with enough fidelity to run software.

Lua, Typed Assembly; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Typed_assembly_language and Sector Lisp; https://github.com/jart/sectorlisp seem to have the right minimalism and compactness for archival purposes. Maybe it is sectorlisp+rv32+wasm.

If there are directions you would like Wasm to go, I really recommend attending the Wasm CG meetings.

https://github.com/WebAssembly/meetings

When it comes to an archival system, I'd like it to be able to run anything from an era, not just specially crafted binaries. I think Wasm meets that goal.

https://gist.github.com/dabeaz/7d8838b54dba5006c58a40fc28da9...

[2]: https://github.com/WebAssembly/meetings/blob/main/process/ph...

The simplest way to get involved is to start attending the biweekly standardization meetings. The agendas are organized here: https://github.com/WebAssembly/meetings

To attend the meetings, first join the W3C WebAssembly Community Group here: https://www.w3.org/groups/cg/webassembly, then email the CG chairs at [email protected] to ask for an invite.

From there you'll get a sense of who folks are so you can pair names with faces when contributing to the various proposal discussions on the many proposal repos listed here: https://github.com/webassembly/proposals.

To get a sense of how things are run and decided, read the process documents here: https://github.com/WebAssembly/meetings/tree/main/process. The TL;DR is that the community group and its subgroups decide everything by consensus via votes during the meetings.

Meetings are scheduled here, along with their planned agendas: https://github.com/WebAssembly/meetings/tree/master/stack/20...

WASI Co-chair here. Nothing in WASI is "somehow blocked by Google", or indeed blocked by anyone at all. Graphics support in WASI hasn't been developed simply because nobody has put energy into developing graphics support in WASI.

At the end of 2023 we counted around 40 contributors who have been working on WASI specifications and implementations: https://github.com/WebAssembly/meetings/blob/main/wasi/2023/... . That is a great growth for our project from a few years ago when that issue was filed, but as you can see from what people are working on, its all much more foundational pieces than a graphics interface. Also, if you look at who is employing those contributors, its largely vendors who are interested in WASI in the context of serverless. That doesn't mean WASI is limited to only serverless, but that has been the focus from contributors so far.

By rolling out WASI on top of the WASM Component Model we have built a sound foundation for creating WASI proposals that support more problem domains, such as embedded systems (@mc_woods and his colleagues are helping with this), or graphics if someone is interested in putting in the work. Our guide to how to create proposals is found here: https://github.com/WebAssembly/WASI/blob/main/Contributing.m... .

> As I understand it, it's not even really possible today to make WebAssembly do anything meaningful in the browser without trampolining back out to JavaScript anyway, which seems like a remarkable missed opportunity.

That's the underlying messy API it's built on. There are specs to make the API more standardized like https://github.com/WebAssembly/WASI

But overall, yeah, it feels like a shiny new toy everyone is excited about and wants to use. Some toys can be fun to play with, but it doesn't mean we have to rewrite production systems in it. Sometimes, or most of the time, toys don't become useful tools.

Snapshot Preview 1 is the standard all tools are building to right now. The specification is available here: https://github.com/WebAssembly/WASI/blob/main/legacy/preview...

It's pretty unreadable though!

Preview 2 looks like it will be a big change, and is just being finalised at the moment. I'd expect that when preview 2 is available there will be an improvement in the quality of documentation. I'm not sure how long it will take after release for tools to start switching to it. I'd expect Preview 1 will still be the main target at least for the rest of this year.

> Like WTF does this mean? The repo tells me nothing

Directly above the sentence you quoted:

"Interposition in the context of WASI interfaces is the ability for a Webassembly instance to implement a given WASI interface, and for a consumer WebAssembly instance to be able to use this implementation transparently. This can be used to adapt or attenuate the functionality of a WASI API without changing the code using it."

> and I've still yet to see a clear write-up about what WASI is.

In the same document: [0]

> WTF is wit?

The first link in that document ("Starting in Preview2, WASI APIs are defined using the Wit IDL.") is [1].

> I click on "legacy" and I see preview0 and preview1, which are basically unreadable proto-specs.

The README for the legacy directory [2] clearly explains what they are.

> Where's a single well-written WASI spec?

"Development of each API happens in its own repo, which you can access from the proposals list." [3]

> Whatever WASI is doing, I don't like it.

Clearly not - you've gone out of your way to ignore all of the documentation that answers your questions.

> And neither does AssemblyScript team apparently

The AssemblyScript team have a bone to pick with WASI based on their misunderstanding of what WASI is for (it is not intended for use on the web) and WASI's disinterest in supporting UTF-16 strings. You can see for yourself in [4].

[0]: https://github.com/WebAssembly/WASI/tree/main#wasi-high-leve...

The Bytecode Alliance initiated a sub-project called the WebAssembly System Interface (WASI). WASI is an API that allows WebAssembly access to system features such as files, filesystems, Berkeley sockets, clocks, and random numbers. WASI acts as a system-level interface for WebAssembly, so incorporating a runtime into a host environment and building a platform is easier.

We are excited to contribute back to Wasmtime and the component model, as well as to new projects and proposals emerging in this space (such as new Wasm proposals, like WASI Preview 2, wasi-keyvalue, wasi-sql or wasi-cloud).

I've been reading the following repositories.

https://github.com/WebAssembly/WASI/blob/main/Proposals.md