DAdavexunit·Sep 17, 2025
Wasm could have had a concept of a string. I frequently mourn the rejection of the imo excellent stringref proposal. https://github.com/WebAssembly/stringref
In WASM 3.0 CompletedWebAssembly
stringref
WebAssembly2022–2025
WebAssembly / stringref
stringref
Discover this repository through its Hacker News conversations.
5Distinct people
5Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
41GitHub stars
What to know before exploring
What it is
A public description has not been verified.
Where it is used
No documented product use has been verified yet.
What people are saying
No recommendation phrase was found in the indexed comments.
No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.
Also in these discussions
No other repository is repeatedly linked in the same discussions.
This week on Hacker News
Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 11:56:56 AM UTC.
No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.
Mentions over time
HN mentions by year5 dated mentions
Observed mentions: 2022-09-08 19:53:03 UTC to 2025-09-17 20:19:50 UTC.
Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.
View mention counts and date ranges
| Period | Start (UTC) | End (exclusive, UTC) | Mentions | Submissions | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2022 | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2 | 0 | 2 |
| 2023 | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2024 | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2025 | 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
What Hacker News says
5 sourcesFrom the new official WASM proposal:
https://github.com/WebAssembly/js-string-builtins/blob/main/...
"the overhead of importing glue code is prohibitive for primitives such as String, ArrayBuffer, RegExp, Map, and BigInt where the desired overhead of operations is a tight sequence of inline instructions, not an indirect function call"
I guess the more elegant and universal stringref proposal is DEAD now !?
https://github.com/WebAssembly/stringref/blob/main/proposals...
I don't really mind, as it keeps the wasm bytecode cleaner.
In Should JavaScript be split into two languages?The idea of Wasm as a universal plugin system is very promising. But string passing is maybe not the best example to highlight, considering that Wasm is introducing stringref to enable zero-copy string sharing between the Wasm runtime and host language.
https://github.com/WebAssembly/stringref/blob/main/proposals...
In Extism makes WebAssembly easyMore like dcodeIO and his AssemblyScript ambitions are considered harmful to us not having to live with the legacy hacks. The sad part is that it seems they have won, and the standard will be uglified on the fundamental level: https://github.com/WebAssembly/stringref/blob/main/proposals... Now the time came for WASI to submit, hence the "fatwa".
In Wasmer 3.0> dcodeIO (from the AssemblyScript community) was definitely not behaving in good faith
I certainly disagree with that take. I don’t see any bad faith, I only see one person being frustrated because his concerns were being thrown under the rug as "non important", I would recommend you to read on dcode's blog to learn more about it [1]. There are always things to improve regarding how we communicate, of course, but those should not be used as a weapon to attack or dismiss someone but as means to improve.
It's also important to note that a few months after, the Wasm committee realized of the mistake and actually tried to solve it with the Wasm Stringref proposal [2].
The way I see the issue is not about UTF-8 vs UTF-16 but about how valid concerns were completely dismissed in what's supposed to be an open community
[1] https://dcode.io/#web