Reflection Stategies in WASI

[StaticallyTypedAnxiety]

Hello! Love the project.

I have a fork which the WASI preview 1 to preview 2. Right now everything is working as expected I have even outbound and inbound socket communication working. I currently reached a hurdle because I realize one of my projects need reflection and I see that it is in the GC target and I think the WASI target is getting depreciated. I thought maybe I will use the GC standard but I think one problem I have is that it compiles with host functions.

My question is

1. Is it possible to compile the GC target without those host functions?

2. If im stuck on the WASI target my options might be to see if I can replicate the work done in the GC to the WASI target. I guess my question is where should I begin looking?

Thank you so much for taking the time to read and answer this.

[konsoletyper]

Is it possible to compile the GC target without those host functions

Nope

If im stuck on the WASI target my options might be to see if I can replicate the work done in the GC to the WASI target. I guess my question is where should I begin looking?

You should start looking into avoiding reflection. You can also try to implement reflection in WASI target, this would be the easiest option.

[StaticallyTypedAnxiety]

I think im going to try to implement reflection. If not I will probably abandon it. Is there any good place in the code to start to look at to get an idea?

[konsoletyper]

You can take a look at following commits that implement reflection in Wasm GC:

ed616f8
17fbc51
8527ea0
30ab6bf
203b349
04123c4
53dca8f

[StaticallyTypedAnxiety]

Thank you so much!

[konsoletyper]

After some thinking I would say that working on WASI GC is also a viable option. You can take a look at WasmTarget class, runtimeType field. But you should notice that some WASI runtimes like wasmtime and wasmer don't support Wasm GC and exceptions. If you are tied to one of these runtimes, then WASI GC would be no option.

[StaticallyTypedAnxiety]

Nice! I am tied to wasmtime but there is an experimental gc and work on exceptions is starting soon so this could be viable. I see that there is a transformer to support Wasi and maybe I can do that fir the host functions. Awesome