Keynote: What is a Component (and Why)? - Luke Wagner, Distinguished Engineer, Fastly

I thought this keynote presentation0 by Luke Wagner at Wasmcon was great and covered it very well. I also found the WIT Format design doc1 in the component model repo to be the most complete explanation of how it's all going to hang together. 0: link to this video 1: link

This does such a good job laying out the real fundamentals of what's happening. Capabilities model, component-model; it's well covered and nicely tied together. The WasmCom keynote What is a component? (and why?) by Luke Wagner is also a great intro. link to this video

Now that there's a canonical ABI as specified by component-model, it seems like the good work can start. As recommended elsewhere in the comments, there's a pretty damned fine talk my Luke Wagner that covers wasm components & the promise. He talks about cross-platform was 18m35s in: link to this video

…to be standalone. Luke Wagner has a talk going through WASI 0.2 that's pretty excellent. The title is What is a component (and why)? , and we go step by step through the properties component-model enables: a Standard Portable Lightweight Finely-Sandboxed Cross-Language Compositional Module . You get basically none of these without component-model. link to this video The properties are amazing. Not only do we get Cross-Language, not only do we get composable, but ideally we get very very lightweight sandboxed processes that can safely re-use modules already loaded by the runtime. This could be such an incredible way to sandbox actively, with a base of supportinginrsriss dwarfing anything computer scienc…

…y, WasmCon, Wasm I/O, and the Bytecode Alliance Plumbers Summit - CNCF projects: wasmCloud, Spin - Blogs, many with recordings, summaries, and transcripts: link , link , link If you want the architectural direction straight from the source, Luke Wagner's keynotes are the best place to start: - "What is a Component (and Why)?" (WasmCon 2023): link to this video - "The Path to Components": link - "Towards a Component Model 1.0" (Wasm I/O 2026): link I mean this, though - what else would you like to see to try and make the content and process more accessible? Are there communities that are doing this really well that we could use for inspiration?…

> - "What is a Component (and Why)?" (WasmCon 2023): link to this video At 18:00 the speaker states something like "It should not be Systems Interface but Standard Interfaces" which honestly sounds like a different project. As an implementer or even as just a user in general, can it be trusted that tomorrow it isn't something completely different? Seems like an odd standard to follow.

We are more or less trying to solve this exact problem with Wasm Components 1. If core WebAssembly is a portable instruction format, WebAssembly Components are a portable executable/linkable format. Using them is unfortunately not yet quite as easy as using repr(wasm)/extern "wasm". But with wit-bindgen 2 and the wasm32-wasip2 target 3, it's not that hard either. 1: link to this video 2: link 3: link