But they also mention components. Does that mean components are part of the web assembly standard now?
And am I correct in assuming that components are an option for projects where the functionality of WASI still isn't adequate?
When reading through all the things going into WASI Preview 2 (basically "everything and the kitchen sink", except for async/await(!) which goes into Preview 3) my first thought was: ok, this is what the second-system-effect looks like in practice.
> components interact only through the Canonical ABI. Specifically, unlike core modules, components may not export Wasm memory. This not only reinforces sandboxing, but enables interoperation between languages that make different assumptions about memory - for example, allowing a component that relies on Wasm GC (garbage collected) memory to collaborate with one that uses conventional linear memory.
Link: https://component-model.bytecodealliance.org/design/why-comp...
...for instance how do you share large amounts of data between components then, there must be some sort of cheap way to safely share portions of memory between components right? Because there are situations where multiple copy steps are simply out of question.
[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tAACYA1Mwv4 [1]: https://github.com/WebAssembly/component-model/blob/main/des...
Yes, the component model is a standard developed under the umbrella of the W3C's WebAssembly Community Group.
That said, while it is relatively stable and hasn't changed much in the last year or so, the component model has not graduated through all the phases of the standardization process yet. It doesn't, for example, have a formal specification yet, although its canonical ABI does have a reference implementation in Python.