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<fr33domlover>Thanks dthompson! Curious to see more news about oaken :)

<jfred>dthompson: I still need to actually try it out one of these days, but the wasm component model from wasi feels to me like an attempt to do the same sort of module security stuff that oaken would get you in a language-independent way

<jfred>it's complex but it feels like it might be necessary complexity given what they're trying to do

<dthompson>the other issue I have is that it has been very focused on wasm linear memory rather than gc

<jfred>Is there something about the interfaces that makes them more well-suited to linear memory than GC, or are you thinking more about runtimes like wasmtime not supporting GC yet?

<dthompson>wasmtime actually *does* support gc now, which is cool

<dthompson>I don't know enough about the specifics of wasi to answer your question in any detail, but when I've tried to read about wasi it's always in terms of rust or c++ binaries or something that doesn't translate super well to what we're doing

<dthompson>I just took another look at some docs and it's just... idk it doesn't seem very good

<dthompson>like check this out https://component-model.bytecodealliance.org/design/wit.html#resources

<dthompson>talking about call by value, borrowing resources, etc.

<jfred>ah, hmm

<jfred>ACTION thinks

<dthompson>an interesting exercise would be to figure out how to satisfy all of hoot's runtime imports through wasi components

<dthompson>like how would we get bignum support?

<jfred>Yeah I was noodling on that a little bit. There are interfaces for I/O, filesystems, and sockets, so those might be covered... I'm not sure about bignums though, I guess you'd probably need an implementation of e.g. the bignum arithmetic operations on the wasm side?

<dthompson>my understand is that there would be some component that provided this that a hoot component could hook into

<dthompson>understanding*

<dthompson>hoot's bignum imports use (ref extern) to represent the host-provided bignum values. however, there is no similar type that I can see https://component-model.bytecodealliance.org/design/wit.html#primitive-types

<dthompson>you can define a custom type and "borrow" it, but a borrow only lasts for the duration of the call. how do you hold onto the reference? it's not clear to me that you can

<dthompson> https://github.com/WebAssembly/component-model/blob/main/design/mvp/WIT.md#handles

<dthompson>"a borrowed handle represents a temporary loan of a handle from the caller to the callee for the duration of the call"

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2024-12-04.log