Extism: Make all software programmable with WebAssembly
Looks interesting. Based on prior experience, here are some concerns people will bring up with this approach:<p>1. Spectre. You may have to assume the plugin code can read anything in the address space including any secrets like passwords, keys, file contents etc. If the plugin can&#x27;t communicate with the outside world this may not be a problem.<p>2. When you say WASM has a &quot;sandboxing architecture&quot;, this is only partially true. It&#x27;s quite easy to define a simple language that doesn&#x27;t provide any useful IO APIs and then claim it&#x27;s sandboxed - that&#x27;s practically the default state of a new language that&#x27;s being interpreted. The problems start when you begin offering actual features exposed to the sandboxed code. The app will have to offer APIs to the code being run by the WASM engine and those APIs can&#x2F;will contain holes through which sandboxed code can escape. If you look at the history of sandboxing, most sandbox escapes were due to bugs in the higher privileged code exposed to sandboxed code so it could be useful, but you can&#x27;t help devs with that.<p>3. WASM is mostly meant for low level languages (C, C++, Rust etc). Not many devs want to write plugins in such low level languages these days, they will often want to be using high level languages. Even game engines are like that: &quot;plugin&quot; code is often written in C#, Lua, Blueprint, etc. This is especially true because WASM doesn&#x27;t try to solve the API typing&#x2F;object interop problem (as far as I know?), which is why your example APIs are all C ABI style APIs - the world moved on from those a long time ago. You&#x27;ll probably end up needing something like COM as otherwise the APIs the host app can expose will be so limited and require so much boilerplate that the plugin extension points will just be kind of trivial.