Stream: wasmtime

Topic: lv2-wasm (https://github.com/Colahall/lv2-wasm)

Ayan Shafqat (Mar 18 2026 at 14:51):

Hello everyone! I have been working on a small experiment exploring whether WebAssembly can serve as a more portable plugin format for Digital Audio Workstations (DAW), using the existing LV2 plugin API.

The idea is to compile the plugins to wasm32-wasip1 and then execute it inside a native DAW using Wasmtime.

The main challenges I’m running into are preserving the real-time constraints expected by audio hosts, and figuring out a viable path for plugin GUIs.

I have put together an early proof-of-concept here: https://github.com/Colahall/lv2-wasm

Since I am very new to Wasmtime and WASI in general, I’d really appreciate any feedback or pointers, especially around:

• Best practices for host to guest memory sharing (e.g. low-latency audio buffers)
• Whether Wasmtime is suitable for real-time / low-latency workloads
• Patterns for instance reuse, threading, or avoiding allocation/latency spikes
• Any other prior works for platform-agnostic graphics API used within Wasmtime (e.g. Vulkan, OpenGL).

I understand this is a bit outside typical WASI workloads, but I’m curious how far this direction can be pushed.

Last updated: Mar 23 2026 at 16:19 UTC