The determinism of the shared memory and sock/http. · general

Stream: general

Topic: The determinism of the shared memory and sock/http.

Hongyu Li (Apr 04 2023 at 15:46):

Hi! There are some situations where Nondeterminism will be brought up and they are discussed in this issue and the public documents. I'm curious about two situations:

Wasmtime now supports the shared memory feature brought from the thread proposal. The wasm module can not be sure what the host does to the guest's memory.
The sock_send and sock_recvinterfaces are also bring Nondeterminism. The communication can be non-deterministic in time, and results.

I wonder whether these situations are allowed to be non-deterministic due to the nondeterminism is essential to the API reason or if there is still some possibility to restrict the non-deterministic in these APIs. Thanks for your help!

Roadmap to determinism in WASI · Issue #190 · WebAssembly/WASI

The discussion about enforcing (ensuring?) determinism in WASI has already been started and touched upon in a couple of issues here and there (#185, #118, bytecodealliance/wasmtime#748, if I missed...

design/Nondeterminism.md at main · WebAssembly/design

WebAssembly Design Documents. Contribute to WebAssembly/design development by creating an account on GitHub.

Last updated: Jan 09 2026 at 13:15 UTC