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

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Recommends boomskats · 2024-01 · on “WASI 0.2.0 and Why It Matters”

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

Recommends jauntywundrkind · 2024-01 · on “WASI 0.2.0 and Why It Matters”

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. [this video]

Recommends jauntywundrkind · 2024-01 · on “WASI 0.2.0 and Why It Matters”

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: [this video]

Recommends jauntywundrkind · 2024-05 · on “'WebAssembly Is Finally Usable, Almost'”

WASI preview1 modules aren't very modular. You can't compose them. All you can do is one shot compile & bundle the world into one massive module. You can't use that module to power another module, it basically has 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. [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 light

Recommends hectaman · 2026-06 · on “WASI 0.3.0 Released”

I don't think it's fair to say this work has happened in the shadows. I work on CNCF wasmCloud, and I know how hard we try to make this content available. - Many standing meetings organized around SIGs, all on the public community calendar: [LINK] - A dedicated Zulip: [LINK] - Conferences organized around exactly these topics: Wasm Day, 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): [this video] - "The

Cites yoshuaw · 2025-08 · on “Rust in 2025: Targeting foundational software”

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]: [this video] [2]: [LINK] [3]: [LINK]

Critical tete · 2026-06 · on “WASI 0.3.0 Released”

> - "What is a Component (and Why)?" (WasmCon 2023): [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.