Meeting 2 Agenda / Notes 1/18/2022

[robertlong]

Agenda

• Adam will give a high level overview of WASM so we can get our bearings as a group talking about WASM specifications

[robertlong]

Attendance

Notes

WASM: Quick Overview by @AdamFrisby

• What is WASM

  • Effectively a compiled program for the web
  • Evolved out of asm.js ecosystem
  • Designed as a potential successor to JavaScript on the web

• Benefits for the metaverse:

  • It's safe and secure, designed for untrusted uses
  • It's got effective resource limits (some via runtime)
  • It's mostly language agnostic
  • Runtime exist for just about every programming environment

• Neat Features

  • Memory is a byte array; serialize your runtime state and unpack it in the next environment!
  • Modules allow safe inter-process communication between other modules
  • Lots of mature tools such as WASMFiddle

• What's going to drive you crazy?

  • No standard ABI
  • No standard memory allocator
  • Effectively seven fixed with types
  • Strings (not in the spec)

• Embeddability

  • Unity
    • Wasmtime
    • Wasmer
  • Web
    • First class citizen
  • Other Projects
    • WASM Micro Runtime
    • Wasmer
    • Wasmtime
    • Etc.

• Quick Case Study

  • Sinespace
    • 128 Public Scripting Classes
    • 5- 20 Members in each (~1,500-2,000 methods in total)
  • Currently classes are exposed to both Lua and C# scripting runtimes already
  • WASM Support incoming soon, but requires a new way of thinking

• Adam gives an example of how it's implemented in Sinespace

• Post-presentation discussion

  • Likely easy to embed into Unreal as well since it is written in C++ and Rust/C++ bindings will be ready to use. For Unity, support was made easier because of C# bindings which you wouldn't need in C++
  • WASM bundle size may not be as important for our use-cases. We're shipping media where the script file size can be a rounding error.
  • Garbage collection spec has been proposed for WASM. Would like to know if this is predominantly a file-size thing of if there are performance benefits.
  • We may want to focus on a few languages for our own examples. We should ensure that it should be usable across many different types of languages though.
  • https://hacks.mozilla.org/2019/08/webassembly-interface-types/
  • https://github.com/webassembly/component-model/
  • WITX possible to be used for ABI definition? https://github.com/WebAssembly/WASI/tree/main/phases
  • We may want to focus on exposing a glTF scene graph to start and not bring security issues around scripts being able to modify objects outside it's own scene graph.

[Trensharo]

Some Notes taken from the WASM Review Meeting

What is WASM?

• Equivalent of a .exe
• Has a binary format
• Designed for small programs, but can do big programs
• Safe and Secure - Does not allow attackers access to your inner systems
• Resource limits built-in
• Language Agnostic
• Easy to send the script's memory as a byte array

WASM Potential Issues

• Interoperability standards don't exist

Projects using WASM

• Lunatic - Web Assembly Project
• OpenSim

Bucket of Ideas

• Global APIs like Raycasting
• GLTF format to start
• Backwards compatible wrappers for JavaScript
• Define Extensions as Modules
• Good Quick Start Guide

To-Dos

• Should work on Permission Management
• Scope Declaration