1

I'm confused about the Webassembly System Interface, and what it will be able to do without a browser.

Would it make sense to write a text editor using the WASI runtime? In other words, would it render text efficiently on the CPU, or would it require a GPU (Vulkan) for that?

Do you think it would ever be able to do what the browser does: render HTML, DOM manipulation?

I understand that both Webassembly and WASI are a work in progress, but what are the future goals of the project and what applications would you be able to write for it without using any web technologies that require a browser runtime?

Darsunuk
  • 13
  • 3

1 Answers1

1

Currently WASI only specs a small subset of possible system interfaces, but there are proposals to things like GPU support. See:

https://github.com/WebAssembly/WASI/issues/53 https://github.com/WebAssembly/WASI/issues/174

I don't there are any bounds on what might one day be part of WASI (assuming such additions conform to the style/conventions of WASI APIs), but I imagine it will be quite a while before you start seeing full fledged desktop applications written purely against WASI syscalls.

sbc100
  • 2,619
  • 14
  • 11