proposal-type-imports VS threads

OSes so have shared abstractions such as file systems and process I out and output. I think the trick is to make the common abstractions richer in a way that enough people agree on and are willing to adopt. Most of the shared OS features are basically grandfathered in. So a big part of this is that this stuff is not really a rational choice usually. It's just the way it's always been.

So upgrading the capabilities and creating new common abstractions in an OS is not that hard. But almost impossible to get the majority to go along with it.

Browsers demo strates and additive way of getting a lot of that. In that we now have essentially two highly compatible widely deployed VMs -- Firefox and Chrome.

https://github.com/WebAssembly/proposal-type-imports/blob/ma...

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.