Wasmer 0.16 Released For Running WebAssembly Programs Anywhere

[ermo]

ssokolow :

You seem very enthustiastic about this. What's your stake in WASM? =)

Aside from wanting to use it as a typesafe way to have loadable plugins in Rust programs once WebAssembly Interface Types is sufficiently far along to replace the use of YAPSY plus Python? I just don't like it when people are wrong on the Internet.

No offence intended (it doesn't seem like you took it that way, but just wanted to be 100% sure).

FWIW, I think the properties you outline sound very interesting.

It will be interesting to see how this will pan out 2-5 years down the road and whether everyone will be able to adopt a good-faith approach to having WASM be THE standard runtime for the web (and beyond).

[ssokolow]

No offence intended (it doesn't seem like you took it that way, but just wanted to be 100% sure).

No worries.

FWIW, I think the properties you outline sound very interesting.

It will be interesting to see how this will pan out 2-5 years down the road and whether everyone will be able to adopt a good-faith approach to having WASM be THE standard runtime for the web (and beyond).

Agreed... especially when Interface Types has the potential to make for some very nice cross-language integration opportunities... like a state-of-the-art, cross-platform alternative to technologies like COM and GObject Introspection.

[ermo]

Agreed... especially when Interface Types has the potential to make for some very nice cross-language integration opportunities... like a state-of-the-art, cross-platform alternative to technologies like COM and GObject Introspection.

I took a look at the community / working group set up around this -- it looks like it is/was primarily engineering driven by browser developers? And that the goal is to have it belong under the w3c banner once it stabilises enough?

[ssokolow]

I took a look at the community / working group set up around this -- it looks like it is/was primarily engineering driven by browser developers? And that the goal is to have it belong under the w3c banner once it stabilises enough?

That's how I understand it, but that's also not a big problem here, because I'm not talking about replacing platform technologies Microsoft's COM or GNOME's GObject introspection but, rather, providing a portable alternative to them to make it much easier and more viable to incorporate code from multiple languages into the same project or to share one module between multiple different languages.

WAIT's goal is to allow minimal-friction exchange of data types more high-level than "array of numbers" between WebAssembly and the host environment (which, for browsers, would be JavaScript), when JavaScript and, for example, C++ or Rust, have wildly different requirements for how such things should behave under the hood.

[ermo]

That's how I understand it, but that's also not a big problem here, because I'm not talking about replacing platform technologies Microsoft's COM or GNOME's GObject introspection but, rather, providing a portable alternative to them to make it much easier and more viable to incorporate code from multiple languages into the same project or to share one module between multiple different languages.

WAIT's goal is to allow minimal-friction exchange of data types more high-level than "array of numbers" between WebAssembly and the host environment (which, for browsers, would be JavaScript), when JavaScript and, for example, C++ or Rust, have wildly different requirements for how such things should behave under the hood.

Sorry if I was unclear -- I didn't mean to conflate the usefulness of WAIT with the origin of WebAssembly. I glanced at the explanation for what WAIT does and it sounds like a really smart way to handle types between both similar and dissimilar runtimes needing to talk to each other.

In fact, I was happy to see that WebAssembly is slated to become a cross-browser w3c standard as that means that it'll likely increase its adoption and that there will be a good framework for managing its development going forward.

[ssokolow]

Sorry if I was unclear -- I didn't mean to conflate the usefulness of WAIT with the origin of WebAssembly. I glanced at the explanation for what WAIT does and it sounds like a really smart way to handle types between both similar and dissimilar runtimes needing to talk to each other.

In fact, I was happy to see that WebAssembly is slated to become a cross-browser w3c standard as that means that it'll likely increase its adoption and that there will be a good framework for managing its development going forward.

Again, no worries. Thanks for clarifying, though. I was unsure whether you thought that was good for its prospects or a concern because it might mean it skewed too heavily toward the architectural concerns for web uses.