Darin Morrison (Apr 08 2020 at 17:11): Darin Morrison (Apr 08 2020 at 17:11):Is it currently intended that the .wit extension will not be used for anything? I notice that in the commit (https://github.com/bytecodealliance/wasm-interface-types/commit/8c4cc5ee2e41d0ea06c7f3760eaa348378a46d51) a bunch of test files in the wasm-interface-types repo were renamed from *.wit to *.wat. I couldn't find a discussion around why the change was made though. The only other documentation I see that currently mentions .wit is this (https://github.com/WebAssembly/module-types/blob/master/proposals/module-types/Overview.md). Just wondering the status because I'm currently working on some parser tooling for webassembly text formats.
Alex Crichton (Apr 08 2020 at 17:15):@Darin Morrison oh the *.wit extension is intended to be the "wasm interface type" file which is sort like a header file of sorts for wasm files, just containing the interface as opposed to the interface and the code
Alex Crichton (Apr 08 2020 at 17:15):none of this is written down, we just wanted to leave it reserved for the module-types proposal
Alex Crichton (Apr 08 2020 at 17:15):Dan also rightly pointed out that having everything as *.wat kinda makes more sense since it's all wasm text anyway
Alex Crichton (Apr 08 2020 at 17:17):none of this is really set in stone though to be clear
Dan Gohman (Apr 08 2020 at 17:20):Yeah; the current plan, extrapolated from that sentence at the bottom of module-types' Overview.md, is that "wit" is for both instances and modules, and just declares imports and exports
Darin Morrison (Apr 08 2020 at 17:21):Okay, that clarifies the situation a bit, thanks. I'm guessing there aren't really examples of *.wit being used for module-types in the wild at this point? I couldn't find anything from a quick search.
Dan Gohman (Apr 08 2020 at 17:21):while "wat" is defined in the wasm spec to be the textual counterpart to the binary "wasm" format, though it may include annotations such as @interface
Dan Gohman (Apr 08 2020 at 17:22):Right, I don't know of anyone using "wit" right now. As I understand it, "wit" is more just a name for a particular point of interest in the design space.
Dan Gohman (Apr 08 2020 at 17:23):In WASI, we're using "witx", which is "wit" plus some extensions useful for humans maintaining interface descriptions. We benefit from "wit" being a known concept that we can define hopefully modest extensions to, rather than being an entirely new thing.
Darin Morrison (Apr 08 2020 at 17:30):Okay, cool. Good to know. I saw some of those .witx files in the wasi repo but wasn't sure about the relationship there.
Last updated: Dec 23 2024 at 12:05 UTC