Phase 4 Advancement Criteria

Context. : Following on from the online-conversation on Advancement Criteria. The main advantage of this proposal is the ability to take legacy code and run it in WASI. @sunfishcode pointed out that POSIX support (as mentioned in the current proposal) is an ambiguous target and the real target was to be able to support legacy code. Therefore a more advantageous approach would be to define a set of example libraries or other software items which should be enabled by this WASI-socket's proposal, and add this to the list of Phase 4 Advancement Criteria.

The next challenge is to define what these libraries / software items are. It is important that such targets are not huge and don't contain a lot of additional other dependencies which may make it impossible to use as a test step.

The suggestions from the meeting notes included:

• Rust
• Python

Most legacy software is written in c/c++ so candidate software which uses the wasi-libc would be ideal. From this perspective, python would be more favorable.

Start by reviewing the advancement-criteria proposal and the meeting-note suggestions in this issue, then compare Rust, Python, and other small wasi-libc-based C/C++ software candidates. Done means adding a practical set of example libraries or software items to the Phase 4 criteria, with dependencies limited enough for use as a test step.