Stream: SIG Documentation

Topic: Detailed documentation for C / C++ development

Milan (Aug 17 2024 at 19:48):

I'm curious what the goals for C/C++ documentation and tooling are expected to be like over time.

To put it in user story parlance: As a passable, maybe even okay, high-level language developer (JS, C# .NET, Java, python, etc), I'm interested in leveraging the component model to bring C/C++ libraries and even runtimes (I have two interpreted runtimes I didn't make, but I want to bring), into the component model ecosystem.

I'm "okay" with C/C++ as languages but the tooling and ecosystem around them much less so. I've been very successful using emscripten for bringing C/C++ to browsers, but I'd like to look at component model for both out of browser and maybe even browser as well. A very large part of why I have been able to be successful with emscripten is the level of documentation: https://emscripten.org/index.html

I think having that level of documentation around the C/C++ ecosystem would help a lot. I'm curious what the plans are if any:

• Would bytecode alliance maintain that resource for C/C++ dev?
• Has bytecode alliance considered collaborating with the emscripten folks? They have a lot of ecosystem advantage (they ship emsdk in docker containers, vcpkg, have cmake scripts, conan, etc) emscripten creates a full SDK (where-as with wasi-sdk you still need additional tooling not included wit-bindgen, wasmtools, wasmtime). Having the toolchains shipped in emsdk would make a more comprehensive workflow.
• Am I completely off base and there are resources I'm not aware of?
• Is this (comprehensive docs and complete sdk for C/C++) outside of the goals of the bytecode alliance?

Bailey Hayes (Aug 19 2024 at 16:00):

In our community we have several folks working towards the same use-case as you described. It would be extremely beneficial to have improved doc, tools, and additional resources to ease folks into a componentized ecosystem with C/C++. I understand from some of them that C++ folks that they'd like C++ specific bindings and docs to make things more ergonomic.

We've definitely talked to the emscripten folks but their focus is largely for the web target. I think we can find ways to complement each other. For example, I wonder if jco's wasip2 shims could be shared between the two projects.

This is absolutely within the goals of the BA.

Milan (Aug 19 2024 at 16:09):

In our community we have several folks working towards the same use-case as you described.

Do you know where that is being put together? So far the only component-model associated C/C++ docs I can find are the top-level README of wasi-sdk and an unmerged component-model docs PR:

• https://github.com/WebAssembly/wasi-sdk
• https://github.com/bytecodealliance/component-docs/pull/66

Neither of which seem like the correct place for docs of the scope described above?

• i.e. wasi-sdk does not seem to aim to be a complete toolkit for C/C++ dev. It's a subset of all the tooling you need to be aware of for a successful workflow (wit-bindgen, wasmtools, wasmtime)
• component-model.bytecodealliance.org seems to be just getting started material and references to external docs, seems like it may not be the intended place for robust / complete docs for specific languages.

Bailey Hayes (Aug 19 2024 at 19:55):

I think a project like componentize-cpp would be a good place to land those types of materials.

For example, we have the following projects today:

• componentize-py for python
• componentize-dotnet for C# and .NET
• JCO for JS
• cargo-component for Rust

It would help to form a subgroup of SIG Guest Languages for C++ to organize this work.

The process to create a new BA project is to essentially create a GitHub issue with this template: https://github.com/bytecodealliance/governance/blob/main/templates/projects/proposal.md

We plan to update the template soon to incorporate hosted vs core project requirements. You may use this proposal as an example of the expanded template https://github.com/bytecodealliance/governance/issues/98

Last updated: Dec 23 2024 at 13:07 UTC