Sharing logic between desktop and web based applications through WASM
an invention by IGonzalezSosa
Updated over 4 years ago. 8 hacker ♥️. 7 followers.

Project Description

A few months ago, the YaST team released cockpit-wicked. Compared to YaST, this module contains a pretty simple data model, but there is still some duplication with YaST logic.

The idea of this project is to write some simple logic and try to reuse the same code from a YaST-like application and a web-based one (like Cockpit). Here is the (over-simplified) plan:

  • Write a simple model that represents the network configuration (most probably, in Rust).
  • Compile the model to WASM and try to use it from cockpit-wicked.
  • Build a desktop/console UI that relies on this model too.

Goal for this Hackweek

To be honest, we do not plan to finish this project in a single week. However, we would like to achieve these goals:

  • Find out how realistic is the overall approach (reusing logic in WASM and desktop apps). Try to identify threats and missing pieces.
  • Learn the basics about WASM.
  • Explore a GUI/TUI toolkit different from libyui that allows us to write some async code. We are not limited to Rust for this part.

Resources

Runtimes

Review

You can find the outcome of this project in the y3network repository.

Looking for hackers with the skills:

yast cockpit wasm web systemsmanagement networking rust

This project is part of:

Hack Week 20

Activity

  • over 4 years ago: joseivanlopez joined this project.
  • over 4 years ago: mvidner liked this project.
  • over 4 years ago: mkoutny liked this project.
  • over 4 years ago: locilka liked this project.
  • over 4 years ago: mbrugger liked this project.
  • over 4 years ago: aplanas liked this project.
  • over 4 years ago: ancorgs liked this project.
  • over 4 years ago: teclator joined this project.
  • over 4 years ago: dgdavid joined this project.
  • over 4 years ago: cfconrad liked this project.
  • over 4 years ago: IGonzalezSosa added keyword "rust" to this project.
  • over 4 years ago: teclator liked this project.
  • over 4 years ago: ancorgs joined this project.
  • over 4 years ago: IGonzalezSosa added keyword "web" to this project.
  • over 4 years ago: IGonzalezSosa added keyword "systemsmanagement" to this project.
  • over 4 years ago: IGonzalezSosa added keyword "networking" to this project.
  • over 4 years ago: IGonzalezSosa added keyword "yast" to this project.
  • over 4 years ago: IGonzalezSosa added keyword "cockpit" to this project.
  • over 4 years ago: IGonzalezSosa added keyword "wasm" to this project.
  • over 4 years ago: IGonzalezSosa started this project.
  • over 4 years ago: IGonzalezSosa originated this project.


    • Comments

    • bmwiedemann
      over 4 years ago by bmwiedemann | Reply

      On the topic of WASM and shared code: https://webperl.zero-g.net/

    • ancorgs
      over 4 years ago by ancorgs | Reply

      Regarding the "explore a GUI/TUI toolkit different from libyui" and thinking about how to make this project useful for the YaST mid-term, I would like to explore https://github.com/AndyObtiva/glimmer-dsl-tk

    • ancorgs
      over 4 years ago by ancorgs | Reply

      I have focused my experiments in two areas:

      1) Developing a really interactive GUI with Ruby (intentionally avoiding libyui).

      In that regard, I found the Observer and data-binding implementations of Glimmer to be really convenient and straightforward to use. See my experiments at ancorgs/y3network-ruby-ui.

      2) Interfacing WASM with Ruby and/or Python (no browser involved)

      The results in this area were discouraging. In theory WASM should be able to communicate back and forward with Javascript when running in a browser and with any "host" language (let's call it that way) when running out of the browser, inside a "native" WASM runtime. But that communication is limited to passing integers and floats. Anything more advanced (like a string or any structured data) needs extra mechanisms on top that are understood by both the code running in WASM (Rust in our case) and its caller (Ruby/Python/Javascript).

      For the browser, we used wasm-bindgen to interface the WASM code written in Rust with Javascript. That works pretty well, but is useless (even counterproductive) to connect the resulting WASM to any other "host" language. See below.

      In Ruby I tried to use both Wasmer and Wasmtime as runtimes. But wasmer-ruby is in the middle of a major rewrite and is basically unusable with recent versions of Wasmer and/or Ruby. On the other hand, wasmtime-ruby is very basic, lacking basically all features that would be useful for a good integration.

      Integration of Python with both Wasmer and Wastime is much better and more mature. But still the current limits of WASM regarding interfacing with the outer world are a huge limiting factor. These are the three solutions I explored:

      2.1) Using WASM Interface Types, which is expected to become the standard multi-language mechanism to do what we wanted. But it's currently far from being a real option. In the Rust=>WASM side, wasm-bindgen could be used to generate the corresponding specification... but it only worked with an old version. Even that was useless because we couldn't use the Interface Types from the Python or Ruby side. Wasmer has never supported it. Wasmtime supported it for some time but now they dropped the support.

      2.2) Reusing what wasm-bingen generated for the communication with Javascript by writing some connectors in Python that are equivalent to the Javascript ones auto-generated by wasm-bingen. It's not trivial and there is absolutely no guarantee it will keep working. wasm-bingen is a pure Rust<-WASM->Javascript solution with no interest in making it easy (or even possible) to reuse their mechanisms for/from other languages.

      2.3) Handcrafting a mechanism to pass a string in which we could even serialize more complex data. That would be similar to this example that uses C++ in the WASM side and Javascript outside. Valid as a proof of concept, but definitely not a real solution in the mid-term.

    • ancorgs
      over 4 years ago by ancorgs | Reply

      > wasm-bindgen could be used to generate the corresponding specification

      I meant wasm-pack

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