They seem to adopt a rapid iteration model closer to browser rather than typical language runtimes. So a browser 1.0 is nothing close to finished. I personally have no problem on it. But I think it is indeed strange that they sound so serious about correctness while constantly rolling new major versions.
Re:Wasmtime 1.0
by survirtual on Sunday September 25, 2022 @04:15PM
(#32975609)
Nothing closed to finished is no joke. Been trying to share memory between a main-thread wasm controlling UI and worker-thread wasm doing heavy compute. One problem after another only to find mutexes are janky / non-operable due to main thread wasm not being allowed to block?
So need to come up with some hacks so my code can do basic things like locks with shared memory. Not sure what these folks are thinking but I’m looking forward to a day when one codebase truly works everywhere.
But still no multithreading? https://github.com/bytecodealliance/wasmtime/issues/888
It is strange to me to call it 1.0 without seamless threading support and while wasm & wasi still have standards to work out.
Multithreading is a basic operation in everything I build right now. It allows me to make a highly responsive UI while doing massive computations without any user experience impact. It lets me make services which can handle thousands of requests a second. And with Rust, this all comes ergonomically. At this point, I can’t think of a single solution I would implement without doing some form of this.
While I could treat a wasm application as a client server model (have one module for interfacing / managing, have X for processing where X is the number of available cores) then share memory between them, this creates a lot of boilerplate and makes the code less ergonomic, and can drastically increase friction. I don’t want to have to hack threading into an application with so much manual setup, and I don’t like when a runtime forces architecturally decisions because it lacks a basic capability.
Anyway, congrats on the release. I will look forward to 2.0 of these runtimes.