> allows developers to use WASI easily when creating new extensions

What is WASI?

API for Webassembly. Common interface.

> WASI stands for WebAssembly System Interface. It's an API designed by the Wasmtime project that provides access to several operating-system-like features, including files and filesystems, Berkeley sockets, clocks, and random numbers, that we'll be proposing for standardization.

Read more here - https://github.com/bytecodealliance/wasmtime/blob/main/docs/...

Permalink: https://github.com/bytecodealliance/wasmtime/blob/8eccc63c46....

Am not expert, but here's the understanding I've picked up:

When you use JavaScript through Node, your JS gets the ability to open files and make network sockets and so on, because there are a set of APIs implemented by Node and exposed to your JS code, like so:

JS <-> native APIs <-> Node implementation of platform-specific operations

WASI applies to WebAssembly instead of JS. So again if we're on Node:

wasm <-> native APIs (WASI) <-> Node implementation of platform-specific operations

But WASI is much more general than Node's APIs, and meant to be used by different engines in different environments (browsers, native bindings, etc).

Simplely, it's wasm's POSIX

> But is unfortunate that they used literally the name of the most famous extension for WebAssembly in VSCode (vscode-wasm), which has been around already for a few years, as it might confuse people on what is what:

At this point, where Microsoft frequently ends up naming something identically to something else already existing (and sometimes quite popular) I'm done believing it's "unfortunate" and not on purpose. Once or twice maybe it's some unfortunate accident, but at this frequency?

It's more likely that they just don't care. There's a certain cavalier attitude from the VS Code project in general.

It's similar to how Google chose "Go" for their language despite the existence of another programming language named the same.

Big companies don't care unless you have a trademark.

Let's give them the benefit of the doubt, and let next actions speak for themselves.

I've created an issue in their repo, so they are fully aware of the issue and they have the opportunity to amend it :)

https://github.com/microsoft/vscode-wasm/issues/62

> So I think from a VS Code user perspective there will be no name clash.

That went well :)

(crying in silence)