Comment by 9d 8 days ago
This is incredible. I wonder if this will be the future of OSes.
This readme is really, really interesting to read through.
Why did you use wasmi instead of wasmtime?
I might actually try to use this OS inside a VM.
Half of me wants to port my own reactive GUI lib to Munal.
Yeah it's one of those projects were I'm so impressed that I'm saying nothing because there's nothing to say, it's just really impressive. I'm not sure what will come of this project, but it has a lot of potential to at least inspire other projects or spark important discussions around its innovations.
Wasmtime maintainer here - curious to hear what went wrong, I and several other users of wasmtime have production embeddings under no_std, so it should do everything you need, including building out WASI preview 2 support. You can find me on the bytecode alliance zulip if you need help.
I think I was a bit spooked by the examples (https://github.com/bytecodealliance/wasmtime/tree/main/examp...), and the need to implement platform dependencies in C code (which would have complicated the build process). Makes sense since it's a more complex and mature project, but Wasmi on the other hand was just a pure Rust dependency that only required a single line in the Cargo.toml. So in short I went the lazy route :)
I'm not the OP, but I have a similar experience with Motor OS: wasmi compiles and works "out of the box", while wasmtime has a bunch of dependencies (e.g. target-lexicon) that won't compile on custom targets even if all features are turned off in wasmtime.
Not sure how to help with this much information but I've built and run wasmtime on some pretty squalid architectures (xtensa and riscv32 microcontrollers among others) but the right collection of features might not be obvious. We can help you find the right configuration on the Bytecode Alliance zulip or the wasmtime issue tracker if you need it.
But if this benchmark is right, then wasmtime is 5x faster than wasmi for it:
The future happened in the 90's: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inferno_(operating_system)
I'd like to see an Inferno with a WASM runtime that utilizes a Plan 9 like ABI/API instead of WASI. Node9 did similar but with Lua: https://github.com/jvburnes/node9
Thanks! I tried to get wasmtime working but it was too much of a pain to compile in no_std mode, so I settled for wasmi instead.