rubyinstaller2 VS WASI

Ruby 3.x (for Windows, use RubyInstaller),

Ruby is the foundation upon which Ruby on Rails is built. Download and install the latest Ruby version from the official RubyInstaller website. This will provide you with the Ruby programming language and its associated tools.

To install Ruby and Jekyll on a Windows machine, you’d use the RubyInstaller. This can be done by downloading and installing a Ruby+Devkit version from RubyInstaller Downloads and using the default options for installation.

Here's the command line I used when downloading it. The exclusion flag didn't seem to work for some reason, and I have a ton of folders called things like "%3flike_comment%3d66879%26_wpnonce%3d4295aac3b6". If it matters, I'm doing this on windows. I installed Ruby locally on windows, and ran this command through the command prompt from that.

If you're just experimenting rather than trying to match a production environment, you could run Ruby / Rails on Windows directly: https://rubyinstaller.org/

I've been doing Ruby on Rails since the early 2.x days. (I dabbled with 1.x, but gave up to let it "age" a little.) For the first 5 years, I was on Linux full time, and it was great.

Then I moved to Mac, and it was almost as great. (The terminal situation and general integration of the command line is still more cohesive in Linux.)

For about the past 10 years, I've been at a standard Fortune 250 Windows-is-the-entire-world kind of place. I've been able to do my work on my personal Mac, but I've always made sure that I can do all of my Rails work on my corporate Windows laptop. There are times my code needs to access file locations and other applications inside the corporate firewall.

Obviously, people are correct that Ruby is not a "first-class" citizen on Windows, but RubyInstaller (https://rubyinstaller.org) has been a lifesaver. Not only does it "just work," and compile all the gems I've used, but it also includes a neat little script that addresses the common "corporate" practice of having to install custom SSL certificates so that IT can decode all traffic going through their firewall. (They install these certs directly into the Windows networking stack, but bundler doesn't use the stack.) The SSL bundle their script creates is also useful for use with Postgres database connections. You just need RubyInstaller, NodeJS, and a better terminal application (or maybe RubyMine), and you're GTG on Windows.

I've tried to use WSL, both version 1 and 2. If you need to support many Rails apps, and switch Ruby versions (with RVM or rbenv), that might be the way to go, but for just one (big) project, I prefer to stay inside the native environment. And even if I were tempted to use WSL, I'd rather just use an actual VM software like VMWare or OpenBox, and control the details of the virtualization myself. YMMV.

Feeling eager to run your very first program written in Ruby? Here's the link where you can download the installer for Ruby Runtime Tools: Downloads Ruby Installer for Windows.

Install latest Ruby+Devkit package which you can get from RubyInstaller for Windows.

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