github.com/wasilibs/wazerox@v0.0.0-20240124024944-4923be63ab5f/site/content/community/history.md (about)

     1  +++
     2  title = "History of wazero"
     3  +++
     4  
     5  wazero was originally developed by [Takeshi Yoneda][1] as a hobby project in
     6  mid 2020. In late 2021, it was sponsored by Tetrate as a top-level project.
     7  That said, Takeshi's original motivation is as relevant today as when he
     8  started the project, and worthwhile reading:
     9  
    10  If you want to provide Wasm host environments in your Go programs, currently
    11  there's no other choice than using CGO leveraging the state-of-the-art
    12  runtimes written in C++/Rust (e.g. V8, Wasmtime, Wasmer, WAVM, etc.), and
    13  there's no pure Go Wasm runtime out there. (There's only one exception named
    14  [wagon][2], but it was archived with the mention to this project.)
    15  
    16  First, why do you want to write host environments in Go? You might want to have
    17  plugin systems in your Go project and want these plugin systems to be
    18  safe/fast/flexible, and enable users to write plugins in their favorite
    19  languages. That's where Wasm comes into play. You write your own Wasm host
    20  environments and embed Wasm runtime in your projects, and now users are able to
    21  write plugins in their own favorite languages (AssemblyScript, C, C++, Rust,
    22  Zig, etc.). As a specific example, you maybe write proxy severs in Go and want
    23  to allow users to extend the proxy via [Proxy-Wasm ABI][3]. Maybe you are
    24  writing server-side rendering applications via Wasm, or [OpenPolicyAgent][4]
    25  is using Wasm for plugin system.
    26  
    27  However, experienced Go developers often avoid using CGO because it
    28  introduces complexity. For example, CGO projects are larger and complicated to
    29  consume due to their libc + shared library dependency. Debugging is more
    30  difficult for Go developers when most of a library is written in Rustlang.
    31  [_CGO is not Go_][5] [ -- _Rob_ _Pike_][6] dives in deeper. In short, the
    32  primary motivation to start wazero was to avoid CGO.
    33  
    34  wazero compiles WebAssembly modules into native assembly (Compiler) by default. You
    35  may be surprised to find equal or better performance vs mature Compiler-style
    36  runtimes because [CGO is slow][7]. More specifically, if you make large amount
    37  of CGO calls which cross the boundary between Go and C (stack) space, then the
    38  usage of CGO could be a bottleneck.
    39  
    40  [1]: https://github.com/mathetake
    41  [2]: https://github.com/go-interpreter/wagon
    42  [3]: https://github.com/proxy-wasm/spec
    43  [4]: https://www.openpolicyagent.org/docs/latest/wasm/
    44  [5]: https://dave.cheney.net/2016/01/18/cgo-is-not-go
    45  [6]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PAAkCSZUG1c&t=757s
    46  [7]: https://github.com/golang/go/issues/19574