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by 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.

1 comments

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.
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!)

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