Add support for loading .wasm (web assembly) binaries

[prabirshrestha]

I would like to build plugins in the language of my choice and ship it as a wasm binary which can then be loaded by vim.

Here is an example of an existing wasm runtime in c that could be included. https://github.com/intel/wasm-micro-runtime

[justinmk]

Here is an example of an existing wasm runtime in c that could be included. https://github.com/intel/wasm-micro-runtime

Does that complement/dependent on bobpepin#1 (or duktape) in any way, or are they strictly orthogonal?

[prabirshrestha]

They are totally different. Duktape allows support for adding JS plugins similar to existing python/ruby and lua interface that currently exists. wasm runtime is different in the sense one can write a plugin in any language such as rust/go/c/c++/(add your favorite language) which then needs to be compiled and shipped as binary wasm files. It can then be loaded in any where it wasm can be loaded. There is also standard library for wasm that is getting standardized similar to the c standard library. https://hacks.mozilla.org/2019/03/standardizing-wasi-a-webassembly-system-interface/. wasm is more of .NET framework or JVM which can run any .net or java bytecode while ducktape can only run JS and is not a bytecode. For wasm plugin authors would need an extra compilation.

For both cases we do need to add some vim standard library so it can be consumed directly from wasm apps.

[justinmk]

Sounds like wasm is analogous to a platform-independent .so library? If so that's very interesting, unlike https://github.com/bobpepin/vim/ (duktape/JS interface) which is just "more of the same" when it comes to vim extensibility. Maybe wasm could finally replace C as the lowest-common-denominator.

[XVilka]

@justinmk sounds exactly like Java to me. Not much people are happy with the software for JVM nevertheless. Native would rule the world eventually, again.

[prabirshrestha]

The biggest difference between WebAssembly and JVM is that is designed for languages such as c/rust and avoids hiding many of the low level stack which allows to be very fast as if running in native speed.

I would suggest to glance over the https://webassembly.org/

[prabirshrestha]

I do have vim compiled with WASM working at https://github.com/prabirshrestha/vim/commits/wasm3. You can try building with --enable-wasminterp=yes. I doesn't do anything useful yet but does show the capability of loading and executing WASM in vim.

https://twitter.com/PrabirShrestha/status/1238928939545849856

ETHlRZMUwAEnGbu.mp4

There is a WASM proposal for Garbage Collector at https://github.com/WebAssembly/gc. GC spec for WebAssembly has landed in v8 under experimental features. https://bugs.chromium.org/p/v8/issues/detail?id=7748.

My problem with vimscript, vim9script or lua is that there aren't many libraries compared to other languages. For example, if I want to create a plugin for urlencode/urldecode, I most likely need to write it from scratch instead of use languages such as rust/go or my favorite language compile it to wasm and load in vim. There are job apis but this starts a new process, cross compiling is a headache when you need to support multiple platforms.