On Wed, 18 Sep 2024, at 20:33, Mike Schinkel wrote:
> Yeah. That was the original goal.
>
> But to say WASM's domain is limited to browsers is not valid any longer:
> [...]
While it's definitely interesting seeing what uses it's being put to beyond the browser,
the majority of those articles are talking about using WASM on its own, in the kind of places where
you might use a container, to host things like microservices, serverless functions, etc.
Embedding it into other languages is a different usage again. It's certainly something that is
being explored, e.g. by Extism, and that seems like a good project for anyone interested here to
participate in, e.g. to help design the "glue" between PHP and WASM / Extism.
> WASM's ability to run on a managed server – assuming it were built-in
> to PHP core
Just to reiterate, if by "built-in to PHP core", you mean "every copy of PHP includes
a functional WASM runtime", that's not going to happen. It would mean bundling (or
requiring every user to install) a huge third-party dependency, with all of its dependencies and
platform requirements, even if they weren't interested in using it.
The only runtimes where WASM is ever going to be available "out of the box" are those
already built on a JavaScript engine (usually V8), like node.js, Deno, Electron, etc. The WASM is
then running inside the existing runtime, not a whole new VM - like running Scala and Java code in
the same JVM; or Hack and PHP in (older versions of) HHVM.
Regards,
--
Rowan Tommins
[IMSoP]