Skip to content

WASI and POSIX? #122

Open
Open
@kripken

Description

@kripken

I'm curious to hear what people think about how much of POSIX should be possible to implement via WASI.

As a concrete example, I may be wrong but I think you can't implement the commandline tool ls in WASI atm, because WASI can't represent the owner/group/world permission levels (there is just "read" permission, but not separately for the owner/group/world, etc.). That is, if one tried to port ls to wasi, I'm not sure how it could print the rwx etc. stuff here;

$ ls -al foo
-rwxrwxr-x 1 me me 117312 Oct 17 19:10 foo

ls may seem trivial, but this also limits how much Python's system libraries can be ported, for example, as people do use Python to script operations on POSIX permissions. So the system ls, python, etc. seem to not be replaceable by wasi alternatives atm.

Of course file permissions is just an example of something that seems not possible in wasi atm. I'm more curious about the general thinking here. Maybe there could be an optional wasi POSIX module (which would have a posix_path_open that parallels path_open)? Or maybe 100% POSIX support isn't a use case people here care about?

Metadata

Metadata

Assignees

No one assigned

    Labels

    discussionA discussion that doesn't yet have a specific conclusion or actionable proposal.

    Type

    No type

    Projects

    No projects

    Milestone

    No milestone

    Relationships

    None yet

    Development

    No branches or pull requests

    Issue actions