workers-wasi VS .NET Runtime

The examples seemed clear enough to read (I did not test them), but I felt than even when teaching by example there needs to be more overview and explanation. I.e., I would prefer an overview of WASM structure and use with examples, rather than just the examples. (I have some (but limited) experience using WASM.)

As for the utility of wasm, note also that Cloudflare workers can run WASM on edge servers [1], and that the Swift community has some support for compiling to wasm [2].

I've never really understood how wasm could do better than java bytecode, but I've been impressed with how much people are using lua and BPF. More generally, in a world of federated programming, we need languages client can submit that providers can run safely, without obviously leaking any secret sauce -- perhaps e.g., for model refinement or augmented lookup.

[1] https://github.com/cloudflare/workers-wasi

Those are great questions! I believe Emscripten will be required for some cases as it provides more features for targeting a Web Browser. If WASI is the only requirement for a Wasm module, then there are three possible solutions:

- Use a library that provides the WASI bindings in a browser environments: there are some OSS projects that provides WASI bindings on top of browser technologies. For example, workers-wasi from Cloudflare [1]. It could be even another Wasm module that provides the implementation for the main one. I know the people from Loophole Labs are experimenting with virtual filesystems (VFS) [2].

- Browsers provides a WASI implementation: server-oriented runtimes like NodeJS are already providing these bindings (under a experimental flag). I shouldn't have stated that as a fact, as browsers may provide it or not. However, I saw in the past the Google Chrome team experimenting with WASI and the browser FileSystem API [3]. So, I think it may happen :)

- [1] https://github.com/cloudflare/workers-wasi

- [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=46jZSXVxYPw

- [3] https://github.com/GoogleChromeLabs/wasi-fs-access

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.

I think modern C++ could be perfectly viable as well. Maybe https://github.com/cloudflare/workers-wasi would be a good starting point? I'm not too knowledgeable on the subject. Exciting times though, I think WASM might be the great equalizer.

While there is a WASI implementation for Workers: cloudflare/workers-wasi, I prefer to implement each import manually - especially when there are so few and especially while I am still experimenting. This helps me to keep the full picture of what's going on.

It's an interesting "time is a circle" problem given that a century only has 100 years and then we loop around again. 2-digit years is convenient for people in many situations but they are very lossy, and horrible for machines.

It reminds me of this breaking change to .Net from last year.[1][2] Maybe AA just needs to update .Net which would pad them out until the 2050's when someone born in the 1950s would be having...exactly the same problem in the article. (It is configurable now so you could just keep pushing it each decade, until it wraps again).

Or they could use 4-digit years.

[1] https://github.com/dotnet/runtime/issues/75148

These can also be passed as arguments to `dotnet publish` if necessary.

Reference:

- https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/core/deploying/nati...

- https://github.com/dotnet/runtime/blob/main/src/coreclr/nati...

- https://github.com/dotnet/runtime/blob/5b4e770daa190ce69f402... (full list of recognized keys for IlcInstructionSet)

Yes, that is true. I'm not sure about JVM implementation details but the reason the comment says "virtual and interface" calls is to outline the difference. Virtual calls in .NET are sufficiently close[0] to virtual calls in C++. Interface calls, however, are coded differently[1].

Also you are correct - virtual calls are not terribly expensive, but they encroach on ever limited* CPU resources like indirect jump and load predictors and, as noted in parent comments, block inlining, which is highly undesirable for small and frequently called methods, particularly when they are in a loop.

* through great effort of our industry to take back whatever performance wins each generation brings with even more abstractions that fail to improve our productivity

[0] https://github.com/dotnet/coreclr/blob/4895a06c/src/vm/amd64...

[1] https://github.com/dotnet/runtime/blob/main/docs/design/core... (mind you, the text was initially written 18 ago, wow)

If you care about portable SIMD and performance, you may want to save yourself trouble and skip to C# instead, it also has an extensive guide to using it: https://github.com/dotnet/runtime/blob/69110bfdcf5590db1d32c...

CoreLib and many new libraries are using it heavily to match performance of manually intensified C++ code.

DEBUG: packageFiles with updates (repository=local) "config": { "nuget": [ { "deps": [ { "datasource": "nuget", "depType": "nuget", "depName": "Microsoft.Extensions.Hosting", "currentValue": "7.0.0", "updates": [ { "bucket": "non-major", "newVersion": "7.0.1", "newValue": "7.0.1", "releaseTimestamp": "2023-02-14T13:21:52.713Z", "newMajor": 7, "newMinor": 0, "updateType": "patch", "branchName": "renovate/dotnet-monorepo" }, { "bucket": "major", "newVersion": "8.0.0", "newValue": "8.0.0", "releaseTimestamp": "2023-11-14T13:23:17.653Z", "newMajor": 8, "newMinor": 0, "updateType": "major", "branchName": "renovate/major-dotnet-monorepo" } ], "packageName": "Microsoft.Extensions.Hosting", "versioning": "nuget", "warnings": [], "sourceUrl": "https://github.com/dotnet/runtime", "registryUrl": "https://api.nuget.org/v3/index.json", "homepage": "https://dot.net/", "currentVersion": "7.0.0", "isSingleVersion": true, "fixedVersion": "7.0.0" } ], "packageFile": "RenovateDemo.csproj" } ] }

https://github.com/dotnet/runtime/issues/59591

Support zstd Content-Encoding:

We might not be that far away already. There is this issue[1] on Github, where Microsoft and the community discuss some significant changes.

There is still a lot of questions unanswered, but initial tests look promising.

Ref: https://github.com/dotnet/runtime/issues/94620

https://github.com/dotnet/dotnet exists for source build that stitches together SDK, Roslyn, runtime and other dependencies. A lot of them can be built and used individually, which is what contributors usually do. For example, you can clone and build https://github.com/dotnet/runtime and use the produced artifacts to execute .NET assemblies or build .NET binaries.

Yeah, it kind of is. There are quite a few of experiments that are conducted to see if they show promise in the prototype form and then are taken further for proper integration if they do.

Unfortunately, object stack allocation was not one of them even though DOTNET_JitObjectStackAllocation configuration knob exists today, enabling it makes zero impact as it almost never kicks in. By the end of the experiment[0], it was concluded that before investing effort in this kind of feature becomes profitable given how a lot of C# code is written, there are many other lower hanging fruits.

To contrast this, in continuation to green threads experiment, a runtime handled tasks experiment[1] which moves async state machine handling from IL emitted by Roslyn to special-cased methods and then handling purely in runtime code has been a massive success and is now being worked on to be integrated in one of the future version of .NET (hopefully 10?)

[0] https://github.com/dotnet/runtime/issues/11192

[1] https://github.com/dotnet/runtimelab/blob/feature/async2-exp...