browser_wasi_shim

This was a pretty fun weekend hack, wasn't (easily) possible until a few weeks ago when I found this blog post about how to execute Perl in WebAssembly. https://andrews.substack.com/p/zeroperl-sandboxed-perl-with-... As I gather, Exiftool is used a bunch by OSINT researchers, many who aren't big fans of the CLI, so I figured this would be a fun browser port. The above + https://github.com/bjorn3/browser_wasi_shim and some regular Svelte/file API stuff were enough, pretty proud of this demo. Thinking if I get some more time this weekend I may implement metadata editing / deleting, and bundling these into desktop apps would not be super tricky.

The webassembly-language-runtimes is focused on providing WASI-based language interpreters, what would require a WASI polyfill at the browser level (https://wasi.dev/polyfill/) and (https://github.com/bjorn3/browser_wasi_shim). Pyodide is certainly another option, but is emscripten based, not based in webassembly-language-runtimes or WASI.

Indeed, some people are doing this: - WASI once had an official polyfill https://wasi.dev/polyfill/, now apparently succeeded by https://github.com/bjorn3/browser_wasi_shim - wasmer-js provides a JS polyfill for WASI https://docs.wasmer.io/integrations/js/wasi - Cloudflare has a WIP polyfill https://github.com/cloudflare/workers-wasi I'm generally leery of non-temporary polyfills, so I'm not sure that any of these feel like a long-term viable option for me.