Our great sponsors
-
-
-
InfluxDB
Power Real-Time Data Analytics at Scale. Get real-time insights from all types of time series data with InfluxDB. Ingest, query, and analyze billions of data points in real-time with unbounded cardinality.
-
-
-
nand2tetris
An implementation of the nand2tetris project. A full-stack computer: ISA, Assembler, Virtual Machine, Interpreter, Compiler, Operating System, and a Graphical Sudoku game. All from scratch. (by porridgewithraisins)
-
WorkOS
The modern identity platform for B2B SaaS. The APIs are flexible and easy-to-use, supporting authentication, user identity, and complex enterprise features like SSO and SCIM provisioning.
In this paradigm, the browser's URL Omnibox can also be used as CLI/repel/input. So each "URL or search" to a browser, can open an app that accepts commands and inputs, and allows outputs, through the interfaces, or back to URLSearchParams (which could then be piped again). Maybe related (diclaimer: working on it), https://github.com/internet4000/find; can be used with "local first web apps", and all the web "apps" which accept input from the URLSearchParams.
The WASM Component Model
https://github.com/WebAssembly/component-model
Wasi co-chair and Wasmtime maintainer here: we agree! Wasi Preview 1, which this article is about, was a first attempt at porting some of these Unix ideas to Wasm. We found pretty quickly that unix isn't the right abstraction for Wasm. Not only is it not really portable to platforms like Windows without reinventing a compatibility layer like cygwin, it also doesn't really make sense in a Web embedding, where users end up implementing something like a unix kernel in Javascript.
Wasi Preview 2, which we are aiming to launch by the end of the year, rebases Wasi on the Component Model proposal, which enables composition of Wasm programs, including those which are written in different languages, and which do not trust each other. Wasi is now specified in the Wit IDL, which has a strong type system for representing records, variants, lists, strings, and best of all, external resources, including sugar for constructors, methods, and destructors.
Instead of basing everything on the filesystem abstraction, the core Wasi primitives are the `input-stream`, `output-stream`, and `pollable` resource types, for readable and writable bytestreams, and a pseudo-future (you can `poll-oneoff` on a `list` and it will block until one is ready, and return a `list` indicating the set which are ready. `wasi:filesystem/types.{descriptor}` is the resource for files, but if you need to read, write, or append to a file, you can do so by calling a method on `descriptor` that returns a `input-stream` or `output-stream`.
We are closing in on shipping Wasi Preview 2 but its not quite fully baked yet - changes related to resources are slated to land in the net few weeks. The spec definitions are on github: https://github.com/WebAssembly/wasi-io/blob/main/wit/streams... https://github.com/WebAssembly/wasi-filesystem/blob/main/wit... . Stay tuned for much more approachable documentation, tutorials, and so on, once we are confident it is a stable target ready for users.
Wasi co-chair and Wasmtime maintainer here: we agree! Wasi Preview 1, which this article is about, was a first attempt at porting some of these Unix ideas to Wasm. We found pretty quickly that unix isn't the right abstraction for Wasm. Not only is it not really portable to platforms like Windows without reinventing a compatibility layer like cygwin, it also doesn't really make sense in a Web embedding, where users end up implementing something like a unix kernel in Javascript.
Wasi Preview 2, which we are aiming to launch by the end of the year, rebases Wasi on the Component Model proposal, which enables composition of Wasm programs, including those which are written in different languages, and which do not trust each other. Wasi is now specified in the Wit IDL, which has a strong type system for representing records, variants, lists, strings, and best of all, external resources, including sugar for constructors, methods, and destructors.
Instead of basing everything on the filesystem abstraction, the core Wasi primitives are the `input-stream`, `output-stream`, and `pollable` resource types, for readable and writable bytestreams, and a pseudo-future (you can `poll-oneoff` on a `list` and it will block until one is ready, and return a `list` indicating the set which are ready. `wasi:filesystem/types.{descriptor}` is the resource for files, but if you need to read, write, or append to a file, you can do so by calling a method on `descriptor` that returns a `input-stream` or `output-stream`.
We are closing in on shipping Wasi Preview 2 but its not quite fully baked yet - changes related to resources are slated to land in the net few weeks. The spec definitions are on github: https://github.com/WebAssembly/wasi-io/blob/main/wit/streams... https://github.com/WebAssembly/wasi-filesystem/blob/main/wit... . Stay tuned for much more approachable documentation, tutorials, and so on, once we are confident it is a stable target ready for users.