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proto v0.13 - Bun, Deno, and Go now powered by WASM plugins

· 3 min read
Miles Johnson
Miles Johnson
Founder, developer

With this release, we're embracing WASM even further.

Core migration to WASM​

Now that WASM plugin support is up and running, we've hit a non-ideal situation where we have multiple competing implementations for "tools" in proto. We currently have 3 different approaches:

  • Tools implemented in Rust and built into proto's core.
  • TOML based plugins, with a simple Rust based wrapper.
  • WASM based plugins.

This is far too many implementations to support, and makes it extremely difficult to add new features for tools, as it affects all 3. To remedy this situation, we've decided to migrate all core tools to WASM plugins, and remove the Rust based implementations. The core of proto and its CLI will still be Rust, but will be slowly migrated into a truly pluggable architecture.

To test drive and experiment with this solution, we've migrated Bun, Deno, and Go into WASM plugins, and starting with this release, they are purely powered by WASM and have been removed entirely from the Rust implementation.

In the next release, we hope to migrate Node.js and Rust as well. And in a future release, the TOML plugins will be compiled into .wat files and loaded as WASM plugins. From here, we will have a single tool implementation, and can implement some really exciting features!

New github: plugin configuration​

Alongside the source: configuration strategy, plugins can now be configured with the github: strategy to locate WASM files from GitHub releases. For example, the bun_plugin.wasm file will be downloaded from our bun-plugin's latest release.

Learn more about this new locator scope!

.prototools
[plugins]
bun = "github:moonrepo/bun-plugin"

Bun support is built into proto, there is merely an example!

New proto plugins commands​

With the advent of plugins, we thought it would be nice to know which plugins are actually configured and in use, without having to manually search config files across the file system, and as such, have added a new proto plugins command.

This command is simple. It will list all plugins that are currently configured for the current project, by loading all .prototools files up the tree, and loading the user ~/.proto/config.toml.

$ proto plugins
bun - Bun
  GitHub: moonrepo/bun-plugin
  Tag: latest

deno - Deno
  GitHub: moonrepo/deno-plugin
  Tag: latest

go - Go
  GitHub: moonrepo/go-plugin
  Tag: latest

Learn more about this new command!

Other changes​

View the official release for a full list of changes.

  • Added documentation for writing unit tests for WASM plugins.
  • Updated proto clean and proto use to load and merge all .prototools from the current directory and upwards.
  • Many WASM API improvements.