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As an aside, to what degree does WASI exist _now_? The spec seems to be in a state of flux as to what the language the spec is written in is, and the language n

As an aside, to what degree does WASI exist _now_? The spec seems to be in a state of flux as to what the language the spec is written in is, and the language new proposals are written in seems to have grown futures? On the other hand, as far as I can tell, the latest draft spec doesn't look to have support for UDP or scalable notification (epoll, kqueue, etc.), so is that really what people are using their existing software with? Docker's great win is that you don't even need to recompile your software to use it, much less port it to what's essentially a new non-POSIX operating system.

jmillikin 3y ago
> As an aside, to what degree does WASI exist _now_? It's ... rough. The impression I get (as an uninvolved third-party) is that the WASI folks set out with a goal of writing a sort of capability-based POSIX that they could write a thin libc for, but partway through realized that POSIX embeds a lot of assumptions that aren't compatible with portability or capability-based security. IMO (again, no direct involvement) a better approach would be to start with a low-level API that is capability-based from the beginning. Something like EFI, or (more experimentally) an RPC-oriented syscall API resembling Fuchsia/Plan9. Then the various sorts of magic integers and process state found in POSIX can be layered on top of that as a library. The good news is that the people working on WASI do seem aware of what they've gotten themselves into, and I think a lot of the chaos (shifting repos, broken docs, etc) is just the natural outcome of them exploring the solution space. My expectation is that they'll be forced to drift pretty far from POSIX if they want a workable design, but maybe they'll surprise us.
- rapnie 3y ago
  Yes, a lot is in flux. Just now I bumped into https://wasix.org https://wasix.org which I have yet to figure out how it (will) fit(s).

jmillikin 3y ago

> As an aside, to what degree does WASI exist _now_? It's ... rough. The impression I get (as an uninvolved third-party) is that the WASI folks set out with a goal of writing a sort of capability-based POSIX that they could write a thin libc for, but partway through realized that POSIX embeds a lot of assumptions that aren't compatible with portability or capability-based security. IMO (again, no direct involvement) a better approach would be to start with a low-level API that is capability-based from the beginning. Something like EFI, or (more experimentally) an RPC-oriented syscall API resembling Fuchsia/Plan9. Then the various sorts of magic integers and process state found in POSIX can be layered on top of that as a library. The good news is that the people working on WASI do seem aware of what they've gotten themselves into, and I think a lot of the chaos (shifting repos, broken docs, etc) is just the natural outcome of them exploring the solution space. My expectation is that they'll be forced to drift pretty far from POSIX if they want a workable design, but maybe they'll surprise us.

rapnie 3y ago
Yes, a lot is in flux. Just now I bumped into https://wasix.org https://wasix.org which I have yet to figure out how it (will) fit(s).