Explore Solutions For Worker Initialization

[vigoo]

We have gotten some feedback that users are confused about how to initialize workers and find it difficult to do so. Part of this is documentation, but I think there are two underlying issues here:

All inputs to the "initialization" of a worker have to come through environment variables or command like arguments, both of which are untyped.
There is no place for initialization logic for a worker to go. For example, if a worker should write to some remote service that it has started life there is no place to specify that except (1) manually writing an initialize function, calling it, and making sure no one calls the worker before that or (2) maintaining a boolean variable indicating whether a worker has been initialized and checking that at the beginning of every function call.
This could be improved by adopting a protocol such as specifying that any worker that needs to perform initialization should define an initalize function. Golem would then look for that and require that the parameters to that function, if any, be provided when a worker is added. This would also mean that invoking a worker that does not already exist and has an initialization function that takes parameters would no longer be supported.

[vigoo]

We will implement two related features in Golem OSS 1.0:

• Ability to dynamically create resources with parameters via worker invocation
• Inherit environment variables when instantiating workers via wasm-rpc