spiderlightning VS wasmer

Yes, wit-bindgen is the way forward here. It's under active development, though a lot of the basic interface-types functionality is implemented and usable. As an example of it in action, check out the wit interface files in this project: https://github.com/deislabs/spiderlightning/blob/main/docs/primer.md

For WebAssembly, look into the Rust APIs offered by wasmtime, Wasmer, or wasmi.

Running a Wasm application outside the browser requires an appropriate runtime that implements the WebAssembly VM and provides interfaces to the underlying system. There are a few competing solutions in this field, the most popular being wasmtime, wasmer, and WAMR.

We've integrated wasmer ~1 year ago in our stack (video analytics and editing platform) to enable 3rd party plugins, but I'm not sure that I'd choose it again. The integration ended up too complicated and the thing I disliked most was that we had to reimplement/port a lot of the functionality we already had so that it worked with the wasm apis. I don't have insight on the wasm execution performance because we never really benchmarked it (it wasn't important for our use case since the plugins code is executed only once on app start or when manually triggered from the dashboard).

I'm not entirely convinced Wasmer will ever be able to shake its constant controversies.

I'm by no means a fan of the Bytecode Alliance, and would much prefer a startup tackle the problems that Wasmer is tackling, but between the trademarks [1], the lackluster response to the trademarks (How did you not know your lawyers were trying to trademark “WebAssembly”? Seriously?) [2], the working conditions [3], the drama surrounding the BCA [4][5], and everything else, I don't think Wasmer is the right choice either, at least not under current leadership.

[1] https://uspto.report/company/Wasmer-Inc

[2] https://wasmer.io/posts/wasmer-and-trademarks

[3] https://mnt.io/2021/10/04/i-leave-wasmer/

[4] https://github.com/wasmerio/wasmer/issues/956

[5] https://github.com/WebAssembly/WASI/issues/3

My advice is to use Wasmer's or Wasmtime's Rust bindings to embed a WebAssembly runtime.

Why use this over Wasmer?

Use a WebAssembly runtime like wasmtime or wasmer.