Blockchain-Flavored WASI

&quot;Slow Database&quot;-Flavored WASI<p><i></i> Any time you see the word &quot;blockchain&quot; replace it with &quot;Slow Database&quot; in your head and see if it still makes sense.

The level of negativity received by this article only because it’s related to blockchain is almost comical. More so for the fact that the name of the aggregator includes the name “Hacker”.

&quot;Bitcoin has UTXO+transactions+proof-of-work, Ethereum has accounts+smart contracts+proof-of-work (soon to be CBC Casper), and Oasis has accounts+confidential smart contracts+BFT&quot;<p>Love how the author plugs his blockchain in that sentence as if it is in the same league as Bitcoin and Ethereum.

Putting an experimental systems interface in an immutable blockchain seems like a bad idea. Why not just use linux x86 or Emscripten asm.js or even JVM? That wouldn’t get you as many HN hype points I guess.

I don&#x27;t see the benefits of jamming the square peg of language builtins into such a narrow use case.<p>&gt; the runtime translates WASI args_get and args_sizes_get<p>&gt; for the zeroth arg to the blockchain address() function.<p>There is nothing intuitive about that for me.<p>In most languages, exposing the blockchain interface as a module feels like it would be a significantly cleaner implementation. If I want to compile against different targets I&#x27;d prefer to wrap that module as a library behind my own interface. I can then swap out the implementation at compile time.

For fuck&#x27;s sake.