Extism: a WASM-Powered Plugin System | Chris Griffing

How awesome would it be if anyone could write plugins in any languages that interop with your application regardless of your stack? Introducing Extism: a powerful plugin system that allows you to integrate WASM code into your servers, the edge, CLIs, IoT, browsers and everything in between.

The talk will start out with a history of WASM and it's predecessor (asm.js). We will even point out Gary Bernhardt's ‘Birth and Death of JavaScript’ presentation and how it seems to have predicted where WASM could go. After understanding WASM and its history, we will outline what Extism is, how it can be used, as well as some real-world examples of its usage.

00:00 in this talk…
00:29 about Chris Griffing
00:59 what is WebAssembly
02:01 what is WASI
03:06 what is Extism
04:51 why use Extism
05:50 functionality
06:26 UI Integration
07:52 discoverability
08:24 documentation
08:52 real world examples
09:25 audience questions and answers

I love building things on my Twitch stream and some of those things have been CLI tools. When you are creating binaries, you sometimes want people to be able to extend your tools with their own functionality. The simplest path has traditionally been exposing a server API for someone to interact with but many security-minded users are averse to the idea of a tool they use running a local http server. You can give your users extensibility without the need for a local http server and at the same time allow them to use any of the languages supported by the Extism toolkit.

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