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by anyfoo 1072 days ago
It rather looks like WASI interfaces to code which is written in one of the other system programming languages that are the topic in this thread, so I guess the answer to the parent commenter's question is "no"? Am I misinterpreting this?
1 comments
chrisco255 1072 days ago
If you want to be pedantic, sure. The point is whether those interfaces are written in C or Go or Rust that they are interoperable, and a dev can write their core logic with a wasm compilation target in Zig, Val, or whatever other language comes up. Hardware and OS devs can write WASI modules in whatever language they prefer so that others can consume.
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anyfoo 1072 days ago
I don't think this is being pedantic. We here talk about languages like Rust, Val, and also C (which we attempt to replace) as languages to interface directly with the bare metal. Think device driver or a kernel itself.

To me it initially looks like WASI does not let you use WASM as a bare metal language (I don't know enough about WASM to judge whether that's even really sensible). Instead, you have a layer on the bare metal (or even several layers above) implemented otherwise, and then you can use WASM still further above, to interface to that layer.

But again, maybe I misunderstood.

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jjtheblunt 1071 days ago
Personally, I don’t think you’re being pedantic at all either because it seems to me that the web assembly stuff is less capable in comparison to things like MLIR. It also required and maybe still requires being hosted in a JavaScript runtime, i thought.
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nilslice 1071 days ago
No longer does Wasm/WASI need JS host! There are many spec-compliant runtimes built for environments from tiny embedded systems up to beefy arm/x86 racks:

- https://github.com/bytecodealliance/wasm-micro-runtime

- https://github.com/bytecodealliance/wasmtime

- https://github.com/wasmerio/wasmer

- https://github.com/tetratelabs/wazero

- https://github.com/extism/extism (disclaimer, my company's project - makes wasm easily embeddable into 16+ programming languages!)

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jjtheblunt 1071 days ago
thanks for the links : i'm reading them and didn't know of those updates
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