Hacker News Reader

Comment by NuSkooler | Hacker News Reader

Interesting. Just this week I've been building a little experiment in order to utilize WASM based plugins in a project I'm involved with. I'm using WasmEdge for the task and so far am having pretty good luck.

Questions: 1. Can WASM plugins with Extism easily call back into host provided APIs? 2. Complex types are supported?

View on HN

WasmEdge is really cool -- I'm super impressed with the work they are doing and hope to eventually provide an alternative runtime backend to Extism using WasmEdge (maybe they'd like to help!)

To answer your questions: 1. Extism provides a specific set of host provided APIs, and currently we don't have support for user-supplied host functions beyond the ones we make available. This will change though, and we're looking for feedback. We held off because there wasn't a clear way to make it easy across ALL the languages we support.

2. Complex types are definitely supported, you need to encode the data into raw bytes and can use whichever format you want (only limited by which formats are available in host & plug-in languages..)

Eventually we will move towards the Component Model which will make the complex types story much simpler.

Thanks for the info! I'll be keeping an eye on this for sure. What I'm working on is a PoC and it's working well thus far. As Extism advances and supports some of these upcoming features, it may turn out to be "just right" for my needs.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com