Stream: git-wasmtime

Topic: wasmtime / PR #10770 Replace `GetHost` with a function p...

Wasmtime GitHub notifications bot (May 12 2025 at 07:23):

alexcrichton opened PR #10770 from alexcrichton:has-data to bytecodealliance:main:

This commit is a refactoring to the fundamentals of the bindgen! macro
and the functions that it generates. Prior to this change the
fundamental entrypoint generated by bindgen! was a function
add_to_linker_get_host which takes a value of type G: GetHost. This
GetHost implementation is effectively an alias for a closure whose
return value is able to close over the parameter given lfietime-wise.

The GetHost abstraction was added to Wasmtime originally to enable
using any type that implements Host traits, not just &mut U as was
originally supported. The definition of GetHost was _just_ right to
enable a type such as MyThing<&mut T> to implement Host and a
closure could be provided that could return it. At the time that
GetHost was added it was known to be problematic from an
understandability point of view, namely:

• It has a non-obvious definition.

• It's pretty advanced Rust voodoo to understand what it's actually
  doing

• Using GetHost required lots of for<'a> ... in places which is
  unfamiliar syntax for many.

• GetHost values couldn't be type-erased (e.g. put in a trait object)
  as we couldn't figure out the lifetime syntax to do so.

Despite these issues it was the only known solution at hand so we landed
it and kept the previous add_to_linker style (&mut T -> &mut U) as a
convenience. While this has worked reasonable well (most folks just try
to not look at GetHost) it has reached a breaking point in the WASIp3
work.

In the WASIp3 work it's effectively now going to be required that the
G: GetHost value is packaged up and actually stored inside of
accessors provided to host functions. This means that GetHost values
now need to not only be taken in add_to_linker but additionally
provided to the rest of the system through an "accessor". This was made
possible in https://github.com/bytecodealliance/wasmtime/pull/10746 by moving the GetHost type into Wasmtime itself (as
opposed to generated code where it lived prior).

While this worked with WASIp3 and it was possible to plumb G: GetHost
safely around, this ended up surfacing more issues. Namely all
"concurrent" host functions started getting significantly more
complicated where clauses and type signatures. At the end of the day I
felt that we had reached the end of the road to GetHost and wanted to
search for alternatives, hence this change.

The fundamental purpose of GetHost was to be able to express, in a
generic fashion:

• Give me a closure that takes &mut T and returns D.
• The D type can close over the lifetime in &mut T.
• The D type must implement bindgen!-generated traits.

A realization I had was that we could model this with a generic
associated type in Rust. Rust support for generic associated types is
relatively new and not something I've used much before, but it ended up
being a perfect model for this. The definition of the new HasData
trait is deceptively simple:

trait HasData {
    type Data<'a>;
}

What this enables us to do though is to generate add_to_linker
functions that look like this:

fn add_to_linker<T, D>(
    linker: &mut Linker<T>,
    getter: fn(&mut T) -> D::Data<'_>,
) -> Result<()>
  where
    D: HasData,
    for<'a> D::Data<'a>: Host;

This definition here models G: GetHost as a literal function pointer,
and the ability to close over the &mut T lifetime with type (not just
&mut U) is expressed through the type constructor type Data<'a>).
Ideally we could take a generic generic associated type (I'm not even
sure what to call that), but that's not something Rust has today.

Overall this felt like a much simpler way of modeling GetHost and its
requirements. This plumbed well throughout the WASIp3 work and the
signatures for concurrent functions felt much more appropriate in terms
of complexity after this change. Taking this change to the limit means
that GetHost in its entirety could be purged since all usages of it
could be replaced with fn(&mut T) -> D::Data<'a>, a hopefully much
more understandable type.

This change is not all rainbows however, there are some gotchas that
remain:

• One is that all add_to_linker generated functions have a D: HasData type parameter. This type parameter cannot be inferred and
  must always be explicitly specified, and it's not easy to know what to
  supply here without reading documentation. Actually supplying the type
  parameter is quite easy once you know what to do (and what to fill
  in), but it may involve defining a small struct with a custom
  HasData implementation which can be non-obvious.

• Another is that the G: GetHost value was previously a full Rust
  closure, but now it's transitioning to a function pointer. This is
  done in preparation for WASIp3 work where the function needs to be
  passed around, and doing that behind a generic parameter is more
  effort than it's worth. This means that embedders relying on the true
  closure-like nature here will have to update to using a function
  pointer instead.

• The function pointer is stored in locations that require 'static,
  and while fn(T) might be expected to be 'static regardless of T
  is is, in fact, not. This means that practically add_to_linker
  requires T: 'static. Relative to just before this change this is a
  possible regression in functionality, but there orthogonal reasons
  beyond just this that we want to start requiring T: 'static anyway.
  That means that this isn't actually a regression relative to https://github.com/bytecodealliance/wasmtime/pull/10760, a
  related change.

The first point is partially ameliorated with WASIp3 work insofar that
the D type parameter will start serving as a location to specify where
concurrent implementations are found. These concurrent methods don't
take &mut self but instead are implemented for T: HasData types. In
that sense it's more justified to have this weird type parameter, but in
the meantime without this support it'll feel a bit odd to have this
little type parameter hanging off the side.

This change has been integrated into the WASIp3 prototyping repository
with success. This has additionally been integrated into the Spin
embedding which has one of the more complicated reliances on
*_get_host functions known. Given that it's expected that while this
is not necessarily a trivial change to rebase over it should at least be
possible.

Finally the HasData trait here has been included with what I'm hoping
is a sufficient amount of documentation to at least give folks a spring
board to understand it. If folks have confusion about this D type
parameter my hope is they'll make their way to HasData which showcases
various patterns for "librarifying" host implementations of WIT
interfaces. These patterns are all used throughout Wasmtime and WASI
currently in crates and tests and such.

Wasmtime GitHub notifications bot (May 12 2025 at 07:23):

alexcrichton requested pchickey for a review on PR #10770.

Wasmtime GitHub notifications bot (May 12 2025 at 07:23):

alexcrichton requested wasmtime-core-reviewers for a review on PR #10770.

Wasmtime GitHub notifications bot (May 12 2025 at 07:23):

alexcrichton requested wasmtime-default-reviewers for a review on PR #10770.

Wasmtime GitHub notifications bot (May 12 2025 at 07:24):

alexcrichton commented on PR #10770:

cc @lann on this as well as it relates to Spin factors and such

Wasmtime GitHub notifications bot (May 12 2025 at 08:28):

alexcrichton updated PR #10770.

Wasmtime GitHub notifications bot (May 12 2025 at 22:45):

pchickey submitted PR review:

Thanks. I greatly prefer this to GetHost. Every time I had to use GetHost I had to look at other use sites and think hard about how to get it right, whereas this is immediately obvious. Also, changing from a closure to a function pointer should hopefully make it more clear that the purpose is projection, rather than causing a side effect, as it has been misused at least once in the past.

Wasmtime GitHub notifications bot (May 13 2025 at 05:33):

alexcrichton updated PR #10770.

Wasmtime GitHub notifications bot (May 13 2025 at 05:34):

alexcrichton has enabled auto merge for PR #10770.

Wasmtime GitHub notifications bot (May 13 2025 at 06:08):

alexcrichton merged PR #10770.

Last updated: Dec 06 2025 at 07:03 UTC