Execute Rhai scripts in a WASM plugin system

[nik-rev]

Hi, I am making an editor and want to have a WASM plugin ecosystem e.g. via extism.

I want to allow people to compile e.g. Rust to .wasm and then execute that

But. I also want to support a scripting language, and Rhai seems pretty cool!

From what I can tell, compiling Rhai directly to .wasm is not possible

But compiling the interpreter to .wasm is possible.

So I'm thinking to do this:

• Have a separate crate that contains the Rhai interpreter
• Compile this crate to WASM
• Ship this WASM blob with my editor
• When I need to execute Rhai code, I just execute WASM Rhai blob interpreter through the same interface that I execute any other .wasm file. This interpreter then interprets Rhai files and modifies my editor state as usual

I suppose my WASM sandboxing will then extend to Rhai too, or do I need to also sandbox the Rhai scripts from Rhai?

Is this general direction the right way to go? I have very little experience in this area.

If you could give me a small example of a tiny plugin system that supports both interpreting Rhai scripts and also WASM blobs, with functions being registered through a single WASM interface. I would appreciate that!

[schungx]

Yes, you can compile the complete Rhai engine to WASM. In fact the Rhai web playground is based on a WASM engine.

https://rhai.rs/book/start/builds/wasm.html

However, for a simple plugin/config/customization system you have no need to go to WASM. You can simply define a plugin API that Rhai scripts can write to (e.g. implement certain functions).

https://rhai.rs/book/patterns/events.html