WebAssembly / WebAssembly/component-model

Recursive Types

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#56 13 comments 10 reactions 0 assignees View on GitHub

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enhancement
Dominant language
WebAssembly
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Merged PRs (30d)
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Description

There was some discussion on recursive types in https://github.com/WebAssembly/interface-types/issues/137.

My takeaway was that recursion would be hard to specify with adapter functions.

With adapters punted to a post-MVP phase , would it be sensible to re-consider allowing recursion?

There were arguments for and against in the linked issue, but I'd like to point out again that having to fall back to resources to represent nested data structures is quite a big limitation and would require falling back to other serialization formats like JSON/msgpack/Protobuf/... quite often to get decent performance.

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Research direction

Start by reading the discussion in interface-types issue 137 and the arguments recorded there about recursive types and adapter functions. The issue names no file, test, or entry point; progress would require a maintainer decision on whether recursion belongs in the post-MVP design and a corresponding specification plan.

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
Needs clarification
Newbie friendliness
25/100

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