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Joel from our team worked on the initial prototype for WASI support in TeaVM (https://github.com/konsoletyper/teavm/pull/610), and we temporarily forked before the WASI support made it to the official repo.
Good reminder to deprecate that now!
Thank you!
To your point, the primary consideration for choosing the languages is their support for WebAssembly, and WASI in particular.
Due to Spin's heavy use of WASI and the component model, languages that have first party support in the WIT bindings generator (https://github.com/bytecodealliance/wit-bindgen) are the easiest to implement, followed by languages that can be built on top of the support for those with first party support.
For example, the JavaScript support is built by embedding QuickJS (in particular, Shopify's Javy project — https://github.com/fermyon/spin-js-sdk), which then uses the Rust SDK.
Thank you!
To your point, the primary consideration for choosing the languages is their support for WebAssembly, and WASI in particular.
Due to Spin's heavy use of WASI and the component model, languages that have first party support in the WIT bindings generator (https://github.com/bytecodealliance/wit-bindgen) are the easiest to implement, followed by languages that can be built on top of the support for those with first party support.
For example, the JavaScript support is built by embedding QuickJS (in particular, Shopify's Javy project — https://github.com/fermyon/spin-js-sdk), which then uses the Rust SDK.
(As a side note for the JS support — adapting QuickJS has been extremely helpful in getting JS support out; however, we are in the process of rebuilding the JS runtime using SpiderMonkey (with which a few people on the team have significant experience) and JCO (https://github.com/bytecodealliance/jco), and the web platform compatibility makes it a significantly better proposition for things like 3rd party dependencies).
C# is an interesting one — the .NET team at Microsoft (and in particular Steve Sanderson from that team) has been making tremendous progress in ahead-of-time compilation for .NET and generating Wasm and WASI compatible binaries (as opposed to their initial approach on Blazor), and experimenting with that led us to build support for Spin as well.
Finally, we do a lot to support other popular languages and their Wasm support — two examples: Python (https://github.com/bytecodealliance/componentize-py) and Java / TeaVM (https://github.com/fermyon/teavm-wasi), for which we haven't fully integrated Spin support, but we hope to get there soon.
I hope this explains a bit our process on language support, happy to expand on any point here.
(As a side note for the JS support — adapting QuickJS has been extremely helpful in getting JS support out; however, we are in the process of rebuilding the JS runtime using SpiderMonkey (with which a few people on the team have significant experience) and JCO (https://github.com/bytecodealliance/jco), and the web platform compatibility makes it a significantly better proposition for things like 3rd party dependencies).
C# is an interesting one — the .NET team at Microsoft (and in particular Steve Sanderson from that team) has been making tremendous progress in ahead-of-time compilation for .NET and generating Wasm and WASI compatible binaries (as opposed to their initial approach on Blazor), and experimenting with that led us to build support for Spin as well.
Finally, we do a lot to support other popular languages and their Wasm support — two examples: Python (https://github.com/bytecodealliance/componentize-py) and Java / TeaVM (https://github.com/fermyon/teavm-wasi), for which we haven't fully integrated Spin support, but we hope to get there soon.
I hope this explains a bit our process on language support, happy to expand on any point here.
(As a side note for the JS support — adapting QuickJS has been extremely helpful in getting JS support out; however, we are in the process of rebuilding the JS runtime using SpiderMonkey (with which a few people on the team have significant experience) and JCO (https://github.com/bytecodealliance/jco), and the web platform compatibility makes it a significantly better proposition for things like 3rd party dependencies).
C# is an interesting one — the .NET team at Microsoft (and in particular Steve Sanderson from that team) has been making tremendous progress in ahead-of-time compilation for .NET and generating Wasm and WASI compatible binaries (as opposed to their initial approach on Blazor), and experimenting with that led us to build support for Spin as well.
Finally, we do a lot to support other popular languages and their Wasm support — two examples: Python (https://github.com/bytecodealliance/componentize-py) and Java / TeaVM (https://github.com/fermyon/teavm-wasi), for which we haven't fully integrated Spin support, but we hope to get there soon.
I hope this explains a bit our process on language support, happy to expand on any point here.
Hey, jesdict1!
Check out this community project that adds support for Zig — https://github.com/tensorush/zig-spin.
I'm impressed you're already leveraging the component model. I thought it wasn't quite ready for primetime yet, but it seems you're proving that wrong... I'll have to dig in more here, as I'm working embedding WebAssembly in a high performance storage engine.
Thanks for the notes! I hear you on QuickJS - I've seen approaches of folks trying to build more node compatibility on top of quickjs (ala https://github.com/second-state/wasmedge-quickjs), but have recently heard about spidermonkey in wasmtime. Do you have intuition for nodejs vs browser in terms of what people want in terms of compatibility?
We made that choice primarily because we want to leverage the really good startup times for Wasm (and in particular for Wasmtime), and not running any guest code (in this case, business logic) until there is an actual incoming request means the server can execute other applications while idle.
Now, HTTP workloads are not the only type of workloads that Spin can handle — because of the way it's built, it's entirely pluggable and you can build your own trigger (for example https://github.com/fermyon/spin-trigger-sqs), and potentially have long-running processes, but that is not currently possible with Spin today.
you may want to take a look at https://github.com/extism/extism
you can check out https://github.com/lunatic-solutions/lunatic for that
Thanks for the question!
Spin could definitely run in more places than what we have pre-built binaries for. Specifically, we could run on all platforms Wasmtime supports today (https://github.com/bytecodealliance/wasmtime/releases/tag/v1...), including RISC and S390X, for example.
And while we have been experimenting a bit with running Spin on RISC, we haven't really had the bandwidth or requirement to build a production build for those yet.
Are you interested in a specific operating system or CPU architecture? Would love to understand your scenario.