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Component Model update published: WASI-Preview 2 now MVP
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Cosmonic componentizes wasmCloud and Cosmonic PaaS
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Creates standards-based, vendor-neutral environment for building distributed apps
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Spurs wave of PaaS innovation
As WASI-Preview 2 reaches MVP, and the WebAssembly Component Model nears completion, Cosmonic has componentized the wasmCloud ecosystem. In doing so, Cosmonic has created an entirely vendor-neutral, language interoperable, secure and standards-based environment for developers to build distributed applications that run anywhere. This also makes wasmCloud and the Cosmonic PaaS amongst the first platforms where developers can build on the WebAssembly Component Model.
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Built on wasmCloud – the popular CNCF sandbox project the Cosmonic PaaS will unveil a host of new features at WasmCon. Capitalizing on components, the platform now comes with application lifecycle management with Wadm (wasmCloud application deployment manager), App View (easy-to-use UI for managing declarative applications with Wasm), custom names for HTTPS endpoints (wormholes) and a managed, globally resilient registry. These new features will allow developers to create applications more quickly and for more locations, with Wasm.
The work of the W3C WebAssembly Community Group, its WASI Subgroup and the Bytecode Alliance (BA), has culminated in the release of the next stable iteration of Wasm Standards – WASI-Preview 2. Published by the BA, the WebAssembly roadmap reveals major updates to the WebAssembly Core, WebAssembly Component Model, WASI (WebAssembly System Interface) and several WASI-based interfaces. It also presents a timeline for availability. These updates provide developers with a modular, virtualizable and robust methodology for building applications and libraries.
Engineered around the Component Model and WASI-Preview 2, wasmCloud extends its Rust foundation into a full-featured Rust-only runtime. wasmCloud now supports true language interoperability – capitalizing on WebAssembly Interface Types (WIT) as a new IDL, and using components to implement deserialization, secure hashing and distributed compute logic. This creates an open ecosystem that makes it easy for developers to bring their own components, to build distributed Wasm applications that run on any server, device or cloud.
Liam Randall, CEO of Cosmonic and WasmCon co-chair says: “Leveraging WebAssembly Components, Cosmonic offers developers an unparalleled edge in building, maintaining, and operating software. For enterprises, this means both a significantly more streamlined development process, and a substantial reduction in the total cost of an application lifecycle. The ability to centrally update application components, and load the most up-to-date version at runtime instead of at compile time, translates into a huge reduction in the cost to maintain open source software in industry.”
The major focus for wasmCloud maintainers is to integrate as many new Wasm standards as possible. There are three major projects underway.
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Moving from Smithy to WIT is a major shift, designed to simplify language interoperability. Currently, wasmCloud uses Rust and TinyGo as SDK languages, Rust and Go in providers. Using WIT and Wasm components, wasmCloud brings support for a greater range of languages including C, JavaScript and Python. As more languages add first-class support for Wasm, and WIT bindings become mature, runtimes like whamCloud will take advantage of idiomatic SDKs for developer applications.
wasmCloud’s open source interfaces now include wasi-cloud interfaces. By supporting a standard set of first-class interfaces, developers can reuse implementations for common abstractions. wasmCloud will still provide the best experience for distributing these capabilities across any physical or virtual infrastructure.
Given the rapid advancement of Wasm standards in Wasmtime, and the gradual move towards Rust, wasmCloud contributors elected to transition all host logic into a new Rust runtime. This brings the wasmCloud Rust runtime in line with standards and represents the best way to ensure wasmCloud can offer a bleeding edge, high performance and stable runtime for developers.
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