The Road to the WASM Component Model 1.0

https://bytecodealliance.org/articles/the-road-to-component-model-1-0

46•emschwartz•2d ago

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simonw•1h ago

I'm unreasonably excited about WASI. WASI is the thing which takes WebAssembly from a tool for running stuff in a browser to a tool that can run entire portable sandboxed applications on a computer - with controlled filesystem and network access.

I don't ever want to run untrusted code from the internet outside of a sandbox ever again. If WASI lives up to its full potential I won't have to - we'll have a robust, cross-platform sandboxing solution for running real applications.

Panzerschrek•26m ago

> I don't ever want to run untrusted code from the internet outside of a sandbox ever again

WASM is great, but I think it's a wrong approach for sandboxing problem. It's technically possible to sandbox native applications (compiled into target machine code) using OS-builtin mechanisms, but it's not done for compatibility reasons, because this is the way things were done last 50 years or so.

tancop•11m ago

sandboxing native apps just gives you security. with wasm you also get a single portable binary that can run on x86 windows, arm64 linux and in your browser with zero modification. you dont need to write platform specific code or use third party frameworks.

wyager•17m ago

I'm curious if people have a good story for why WASI will succeed where Java failed

simonw•3m ago

My main one is that WASI has benefitted from an additional 31 years of accumulated industry-wide experience compared to when Java was first released.

fyrn_•1h ago

Please please please bring it to the browser. I'm so done with the terrible ergonomics of everything at the was bounary having to pretend it's JavaScript

enos_feedler•57m ago

It works in the browser already: https://github.com/bytecodealliance/jco

jauntywundrkind•36m ago

It works in the browser already, by bundling another browser runtime engine into wasm. You need a whole fork of Mozilla's SpiderMonkey engine, compiled to wasm, running in whatever browser you have, to run wasm components today.

I confess I was quite frustrated at first when browsers all said no to wasi / wasm components. But honestly, it was the right call. It's taken so long to make wasm components happen, to get them far enough along to start really consider implementing. I can accept that as just the reality of what it takes for a small team to do such amazing work. I am so thankful for the folks who have kept this going, kept advancing.

But it's time now. I hope browsers can help get us set up for 1.0, and I hope they're moving quickly towards being ready to implement!

thefounder•1h ago

It’s great we are past the “wasm is not replacing JavaScript” phase. Or “you don’t need DOM for wasm . That’s what JavaScript is for”

shevy-java•1h ago

WASM first appeared in 2017.

It still hasn't really reached a breakthrough.

Billions use HTML+CSS+JavaScript. Who really uses WASM? There are of course users, but very, very few in absolute numbers. Many projects are not web-based really. For Autodesk Fusion, as one example for many, I have some mega-slow application that takes forever to work with in some cases on my laptop (it is not the fastest laptop, but I recently tested this on a faster desktop computer with 32GB RAM and it is still slow to no ends; using it all WASM based would be even slower I bet. That's not winning anyone over ...).

esafak•1h ago

WASM made Figma.

aatd86•1h ago

WASM is super useful for FFI in some env

h4ch1•1h ago

I wrote an Unreal file parser in C# and use it in our in-house web based DAM. It was much more ergonomic and performant than writing it in Javascript.

simonw•33m ago

According to https://chromestatus.com/metrics/feature/timeline/popularity... WebAssembly runs on about 6.11% of Chrome page loads, up from 3.37% in January 2024.

wyager•10m ago

Very exited about WASM/WCM as a portable format for capability-secure applications.

I had a spec file sitting around for an OS project idea I had, where the kernel would just be the WASM compiler + a few small shim drivers, and everything else (including e.g. PCIe device drivers) would be WASM modules with WIT interface specs. I handed the spec off to Fable and it seems to have made a working proof-of-concept. Has a maximally-WASM OS running on browser/QEMU/Orange Pi. https://eo9.org

rohitsriram•1m ago

The microkernel analogy for the Component Model vs WASI is actually a really useful mental model that I hadn't seen framed that way before. Component Model as the always-present kernel, WASI as optional OS services on top. That framing makes it obvious why browser implementation of the Component Model is tractable even though browsers have strong opinions about I/O, and why 1.0 for the Component Model and WASI are separate milestones. The lazy ABI change is also underrated, zero-copy forwarding between calls is going to matter a lot for the use cases where WASM actually competes with native.

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