The recent introduction of WASIX, a new mechanism developed by Wasmer with the aim of simplifying WebAssembly compilation, has faced opposition from the Bytecode Alliance. As a consortium co-founded by Mozilla, Red Hat, Intel, and Fastly, the Bytecode Alliance actively supports WebAssembly standardization initiatives, including the WebAssembly System Interface (WASI) and the WebAssembly Component Model. The alliance views WASIX as non-standard and thus does not endorse it.
According to Till Schneidereit, co-founder and technical steering committee member of the Bytecode Alliance, the alliance's mission is to encourage the development of innovative software foundations, such as WASI and WebAssembly. He emphasized the alliance's commitment to open standards whenever possible and believes that both WASI and the WebAssembly Component Model align well with this mission. Schneidereit also pointed out that the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is the most suitable venue for developing these standards.
Unveiled by Wasmer on May 30th and touted as a superset of WASI, WASIX is a specification and toolchain designed to facilitate the creation of applications with POSIX compatibility and streamline compilation to WebAssembly. Syrus Akbary, Wasmer founder and CEO, explains that the primary objective of WASIX is to enable any program to run on top of WebAssembly, including popular projects requiring system calls that are unlikely to be adopted by WASI, such as the fork syscall.
However, Akbary has argued that WASI is experiencing breaking changes, which complicates the updating process for Wasm runtime implementers. In the interim, WASIX addresses gaps in WASI and maintains backward compatibility with WASI Preview 1.
Schneidereit referred to WASIX as a fork of WASI and maintained the Bytecode Alliance's position on the matter. He stated that relying on WebAssembly as the sole implementation technology would not fundamentally improve this model, highlighting the need for both the Component Model and WASI to address key challenges in software development from supply chain security and reliability to resource efficiency and developer productivity.
The WebAssembly Component Model enhances Wasm by offering features like strong encapsulation of a component's memory, seamless linking of modules, and a language-agnostic interface. Multiple WebAssembly runtimes, as well as diverse platform providers, have already endorsed the Component Model, according to Schneidereit.
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