WebAssembly / WebAssembly/component-model

Interface version / compatibilty changes

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0.3.x
Dominant language
WebAssembly
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Forks
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Avg merge
2d 1h
Merged PRs (30d)
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Description

Wasmtime currently performs a slightly complicated dance to allow a guest import/export of an interface to be linked with a different but semver-compatible host version of that interface. For a description of why this behavior was implemented see https://github.com/bytecodealliance/wasmtime/issues/7860. Based on a discussion with @lukewagner and @alexcrichton we think this behavior can be brought into the spec itself with some relatively straightforward changes:

With these spec changes, bindings generators would start emitting canonicalized versions in import/export names. This should effectively give behavior similar to what the Wasmtime linker does today, and additionally should solve the same underlying version compatibility problems for other tools like wac and wasi-virt.

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First steps

  1. Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
  2. Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
  3. Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
  4. Open a pull request that references the issue number.

Research direction

Start with design/mvp/BuildTargets.md and the linked component-model PR, then review issue #7860 for the existing compatibility behavior. Done means the specification defines interface version canonicalization, accepts canonical versions, preserves original versions for round-tripping, and specifies enforcement before 1.0.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Assessment

Tech stack
wasm
Domain
compilers
Issue type
Feature
Difficulty
5/5
Estimated time
Over a week
Activity status
Stale
Clarity
Mostly clear
Newbie friendliness
35/100

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