memory-control VS browser_wasi_shim

Indeed, webassembly is moving extremely slowly. I started a project years ago expecting https://github.com/WebAssembly/memory-control/blob/main/prop... and https://github.com/WebAssembly/memory64 to be fixed at some point. Neither are yet, and the project still suffers from it to this day.

I think wasm is still great without these fixes, but I have lost confidence in the idea that wasm will reach its full potential any time soon.

Additionally, googlers are championing memory control https://github.com/WebAssembly/memory-control/blob/main/prop..., which provides memory protection.

But researching it a bit I found this issue, so it clearly seems to be a problem for a bunch of people out there. And apparently both V8 and Spidermonkey have already addressed this quite recently, see this issue.

FWIW there is a proposal in the works to add page-based protection, which will allow unmapping the 0 page, restoring the trap-on-null-deref behavior that is important for many languages with safety checks.

https://github.com/WebAssembly/memory-control

There are many options, but what worked best for me is compiling with cargo-wasi and loading the resulting Wasm file with browser_wasi_shim. Using wasm32-wasi instead of wasm32-unknown-unknown requires a bit more work (the communication with JS has to be set up manually), but gives the flexibility of having just a Wasm file that can be dropped in and loaded dynamically. (There's wit-bindgen for generating wrapping code according to an interface definition but I didn't have much success with it.)

The webassembly-language-runtimes is focused on providing WASI-based language interpreters, what would require a WASI polyfill at the browser level (https://wasi.dev/polyfill/) and (https://github.com/bjorn3/browser_wasi_shim).

Pyodide is certainly another option, but is emscripten based, not based in webassembly-language-runtimes or WASI.

Indeed, some people are doing this:

- WASI once had an official polyfill https://wasi.dev/polyfill/, now apparently succeeded by https://github.com/bjorn3/browser_wasi_shim

- wasmer-js provides a JS polyfill for WASI https://docs.wasmer.io/integrations/js/wasi

- Cloudflare has a WIP polyfill https://github.com/cloudflare/workers-wasi

I'm generally leery of non-temporary polyfills, so I'm not sure that any of these feel like a long-term viable option for me.

Browser client library uses browser_wasi_shim to communicate with the module.