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2023-08-02 Community Meeting

Brooks Townsend

Agenda

  • DEMO / UPDATE: Rust wit capability providers and codegen
  • DISCUSSION: wasmCloud roadmap and WebAssembly standards

Meeting Notes

  • DEMO & DISCUSSION: Rust wit capability providers and codegen - Taylor
    • We have a working example of the working Rust SDK!
    • This follows all the RPC protocols we would expect.
    • NATS messaging provider converted to wit-ified version of the contract.
    • Check out the recording to see the new provider SDK and codebase.
    • This has simplified things a lot inside the code itself: we have trimmed it to make it as simple as possible.
    • Meanwhile we are working on the witification of capability providers and Wasfills. These updates will fundamentally change the process of developing on a capability provider.
    • Things that currently exist will run on the new Rust host. We can't yet guarantee new components will run on the old host. Put another way, we're optimizing for backwards compatibility over forwards compatibility in terms of these new advancements.
    • Exactly the same binary protocol under the hood.
  • Wasifills:
    • Wasifills are only for custom contracts, wasi-cloud contracts are supported natively by the wasmCloud Rust host.
    • For custom contracts we need a wasifill - essentially a translation layer.
    • The introduction of Wasifills means that wasmCloud logic is never in your logic code.
    • In this model the translation layer is built once in any language.
    • Any language that uses a custom contract will need a wasifill.
    • Check the recording for the detailed demo and wider community discussion.
  • DISCUSSION: wasmCloud roadmap and WebAssembly standards
    • The next stable iteration of WASI-Preview 2 has been published as part of the overall server-side Wasm standards effort.
    • We have put together a new wasmCloud roadmap that tracks the Bytecode Alliance Roadmap.
    • This is an exciting time as we have componentized wasmCloud in line with these new standard and the soon-to-be-finalized Component Model.
    • As we move towards WasmCon in September, stay tuned for more detail on the wasmCloud blog.
    • As you know any open source project is going through constant change but we now have a high level wasmCloud roadmap. Currently in review by docs maintainers.
    • Find the relevant pages on our docs site. Also a continously updated GitHub Project.
    • Loosely pinned to q3 and q4 of 2023.
  • Goals:
    • Leverage as many wasm standards as possible - WASI, Wasm components, wasi-cloud interfaces etc.
    • Roadmap inspired by the content in the BCA blog.
    • Leverage WIT across wasmCloud - using wit-types will allow us to extend to many more languages as they become available.
    • Transitioning feature focus to Rust. ADR-0013 focusing on wasmCloud host as a portable, stable high performance runtime.

Recording