alt Hacker NewsIt works in the browser already, by bundling another browser runtime engine into wasm. You need a whole fork of Mozilla's SpiderMonkey engine, compiled to wasm, running in whatever browser you have, to run wasm components today.
I confess I was quite frustrated at first when browsers all said no to wasi / wasm components. But honestly, it was the right call. It's taken so long to make wasm components happen, to get them far enough along to start really consider implementing. I can accept that as just the reality of what it takes for a small team to do such amazing work. I am so thankful for the folks who have kept this going, kept advancing.
But it's time now. 0.3 delivers an incredibly comprehensive & gorgeous suite of capabilities that offer a winning combination of characteristics (fast, lightweight, sandboxable, runtime composeable components) that is ideal for the web. I hope browsers can help get us set up for 1.0, help steer us forwards towards that spec, and I hope they're moving quickly towards being ready to implement!
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I agree with you, but sadly without killer use cases in the browser this still ends up being quite political to adopt. I feel good about the approach being taken. The browser vendors have analytics on the usage of JCO and so despite it not being "ideal", it works. We need to make stuff using JCO and make those things popular. It's not on the browser vendors to build native component model yet. At some point I suspect it will be though.
[Creator of the StarlingMonkey JS runtime here]
> It works in the browser already, by bundling another browser runtime engine into wasm.
Note that that's not how JCO works: JCO unbundles a Component, emitting core wasm modules plus JS glue code. JCO also is a toolchain that can orchestrate turning JS into a Component, and that does bundle a JS runtime (StarlingMonkey), but that's not for running Components in JS/browsers, but for running JS in Component runtimes, such as Wasmtime.