wagi VS gc

WAGI and WCGI are the WASM based spiritual successors.

https://github.com/deislabs/wagi

https://wasmer.io/posts/announcing-wcgi

Compile a CGI program in any language to WASI, then use https://github.com/deislabs/wagi to run it.

Yeah of course! They've got STDIN/STDOUT/STDERR and I've built a Virtual Filesystem. But if you're using WASI binaries locally they don't have that restriction.

You might be interested in WAGI: https://github.com/deislabs/wagi

And to catch up on WASI: https://xeiaso.net/talks/unix-philosophy-logical-extreme-was...

As I'm sure you've heard, WASM has been growing in popularity and use over the past few years. And with the creation of WASI (Web Assembly System Interface) and WAGI (Web Assembly Gateway Interface), WASM is starting to venture outside of running just in the browser. And in the case of WAGI, if you've been programming since the earlier days of the internet, it might feel very similar to CGI programming (and that's because it's based on CGI1.1!) WAGI provides a way for developers to define handlers for HTTP requests and route them to specific functions inside of, or entire, WASM modules. It does so by piping the headers of the incoming request to os.Args[1:], piping the body of the incoming request to os.Stdin, and writing the response to os.Stdout. (To learn more about configuring, routing, compiling, and deploying WAGI routes, as well as the limitations of WAGI routes, please consult the WAGI docs and the TinyGo WASM docs)

What do you think of WAGI [1], which is basically CGI for WASM modules.

[1]: https://github.com/deislabs/wagi/blob/main/docs/writing_modu...

as serverless functions (https://github.com/deislabs/wagi)

I'm experimenting with WASM & Rust but with a different framework named wagi, there's a great video by Rainer Stropek & Stefan Baumgartner that gives a little introduction to it [0]

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9NDwHBjLlhQ

[1]: https://github.com/deislabs/wagi

Krustlet and WAGI are two such projects.

It does support it, the runtime we are currently using enables that -- see https://github.com/deislabs/wagi/blob/main/docs/writing_modu...

Good point on the docs, I will open an issue and add some information about it, thanks!

It may take some time for WasmGC to be usable by .NET. Based on the discussions the first version of WasmGC does not have a good way to handle a few .NET specific scenarios, and said scenarios are "post-post-mvp". [0]

My concern, of course, is that there is not much incentive for those features to be added if .NET is the only platform that needs them... at that point having a form of 'include' (to where a specific GC version can just be cached and loaded by another WASM assembly) would be more useful, despite the pain it would create.

[0] - https://github.com/WebAssembly/gc/issues/77

Yes, that's definitely true: a single GC will not be optimal for everything, or even possible. Atm interior pointers are not supported at all, for example, but they are on the roadmap for later:

https://github.com/WebAssembly/gc/blob/main/proposals/gc/Pos...

What launched now is enough WasmGC to support a big and useful set of languages (Java, Kotlin, Dart, OCaml, Scheme), but a lot more work will be required here!

GC proposal is from 2018: https://github.com/WebAssembly/proposals/issues/16 and there’s code: https://github.com/WebAssembly/gc/blob/master/proposals/gc/O...

Seems like an awefully long time for progress to be made, given all the possibilities it would unlock.

First is the size. Writing a server-side and client-side program is possible with Rust, and the resulting WASM package will be small enough. At the same time, Microsoft Blazor converts C# code to WASM, but the client delivery has to include the reduced .NET runtime, taking several megabytes for a script. The same is true for GoLang, even with an attempt to reduce the runtime delivery in TinyGo WASM. Developers want to work with their favorite languages, whether it is Java, Kotlin, Dart, C#, F#, Swift, Ruby, Python, C, C++, GoLang, or Rust. These languages produce groups of runtimes. For example, JVM and .NET have many common parts, Ruby and Python are dynamically interpreted at runtime, and all mentioned depend on automatic garbage collection. For smaller WASM packages, browser vendors can include extended runtime implementations, for example, by delivering a general garbage collector as part of WASM. Garbage collection support by WASM is currently in progress: WASM GC, .NET WASM Notes.

My understanding is that the main limitation is technical. WASM doens't do GC or the host system calling conventions and cannot interact directly with object from Javascript because of this. However, this is being worked[0] on and will be solved eventually. Even without this the performance overhead of bridging to JS is low enough that WASM frameworks can beat out React.

0: https://github.com/WebAssembly/gc/blob/main/proposals/gc/Ove...

I’ve just watched a video on YouTube from Google I/O 2023 on Flutter for the web. Kevin Moore explains that Flutter can compile to Wasm, but now that GC support has been added to the standard and WasmGC is supported in Chromium and Firefox, I’m quite intrigued.

I have found the main thread about using WebAssembly GC in C#: https://github.com/WebAssembly/gc/issues/77. If I understand it correctly, it is not possible to use the current prototype version of GC in C#.

The .net team has given their notes on it, the concern is more on the memory layout from what I remember. Though it may be possible still. The runtime would likely still ship some gc code, but only a subset for cases not supported by the wasm gc itself and a few more for interfacing with the gc service, which overall should still result on smaller payloads compared to current sizes.

I assume that's one of the parts of the work done at https://github.com/WebAssembly/gc - not happening any soon yet, but it'll eventually be done.