Stream: general

Topic: Better Developer Outreach

Liam Randall (Sep 15 2023 at 13:01):

Reading through this thread: https://github.com/ziglang/zig/issues/17115

There was a comment in the thread that was inaccurate about the state and status of WASI Preview 2 and all of the good work happening across the BA and member companies. @Till Schneidereit I appreciate your comment :)

There are some folks who are not up to speed on what we are trying to drive with WASI Preview 2 and the WebAssembly Component model. This year I think we have done a good job improving our communication:

• Monthly community streams
• Public Roadmaps
• an entire conference devoted to wasm - wasmCon

I am not making anyone bad here; my question is, what else _should_ we be doing or _could_ we be doing to help improve our communication?

• Language-specific outreaches?
• Contributing documentation back to communities?

What other ideas do folks have?

Liam Randall (Sep 15 2023 at 13:03):

I think we have already started to brainstorm some good community ideas, like a developers conference early in the year and doing wasmcon again 2024.

Christof Petig (Sep 16 2023 at 11:11):

We discussed the WASIX vs component model difference some time ago in the veloren discord

Basically what gave me worries during my journey learning preview2 was:

• Components are incompatible with binaryen and wabt, although they have the same extension .wasm (I later learned that the reason is that components contain multiple modules, aka old style wasm binaries)
• Components are incompatible with wasi-threads :shock: (I made them work wit jco last week, separate longer story)
• Having old style wit along witx along up to date wit around, with different evolutions of documentation
• Neither wasi-SDK nor Rust target for preview2 (I hacked preview1-adapter into a static library for convenience)
• Most runtimes don't support components (WAMR being my focus, working in a similar area to Bosch)

After learning the story behind these decisions I agree with every one, resources are great, it just looks like arbitrarily introduced incompatibilities when viewed from the outside.

For sure the state of preview2 blogpost and Wasmcon and Bacon created a lot of visibility and the documentation and tooling has improved a lot in the past months.

Christof Petig (Sep 16 2023 at 11:19):

See also https://ziglang.org/news/bounties-damage-open-source-projects/ for a critical response from the zig team.

Christof Petig (Sep 16 2023 at 11:25):

Being unable to easily tell which generation of wit I am looking at is what I was referring to in the third bullet. (I learned to look at the package keyword and the use syntax.)

Ralph (Sep 18 2023 at 11:19):

I think it's just more outreach. Here, we should ping some ziggurats

code red art (Oct 04 2023 at 22:22):

Honestly, as an outsider, i don't see any wasm stuff outside the usual clickbait garbage. I think the main problem at the moment is a lack of a central repository of information.
Everything is basically in interlinked github issues, files, mdbooks, meeting notes, whatever. An average developer going to https://wasi.dev will find no information about where today's wasm/wasi stands. Half the links are broken if you go down that rabbit hole.

Having a properly updated website would really help people keep up with the progress and atleast have some authoritative source to refer to when they are in doubt.
A good example is https://www.vulkan.org/ which keeps everything vulkan in one place including great blogposts (crucial for learning/teaching), tutorials, code samples, surveys, tooling updates etc...

Last updated: Dec 23 2024 at 12:05 UTC