Resource export is unclear

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#337 6 comments 1 reaction 0 assignees View on GitHub

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Assessment

Difficulty
5/5
Estimated time
Over a week
Newbie friendliness
30/100
Issue type
Feature
Clarity
Needs clarification
Activity status
Stale
Tech stack
go, wasm
Domain
tooling

Research direction

Start by comparing the old and latest wit-bindgen-go resource export APIs using the WIT counter example and the generated resourceexampleapi.Exports.Counter handlers. Determine whether cm.Rep and the manual counters map are intended, then document or propose the expected resource-lifecycle behavior and validate it with an applicable binding-generation test if one exists.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Description

Hi!
I'm in the middle of migrating from the old binding generator in wit-bindgen to the latest version of wit-bindgen-go and got confused by what exactly new way of exporting resources is.

Let's take an example where we define and export a counter resource:

package resource:example;

interface api {
  resource counter {
    constructor(name: string);
    add: func(value: u64);
    get: func() -> u64;
  }
}

world example {
  export api;
}

In the old binding generator to export this, it was possible to write a Go struct with methods on it and a constructor on the exported type:

// struct representing the component
type ResourceExampleImpl struct {
}

// struct representing an instance of the resource
type Counter struct {
	name    string
	current uint64
}

func (e *ResourceExampleImpl) ConstructorCounter(name string) resource_example.ExportsResourceExampleApiCounter {
	return &Counter{
		name:    name,
		current: 0,
	}
}

func (e *Counter) MethodCounterAdd(value uint64) {
	e.current += value
}

func (e *Counter) MethodCounterGet() uint64 {
	return e.current
}

func init() {
	resource_example.SetExportsResourceExampleApi(&ResourceExampleImpl{})
}

With the latest wit-bindgen-go the only way I found to do the same is to manually maintain a map of the generated resources indexed by cm.Rep:

type Counter struct {
	name    string
	current uint64
}

func NewCounter(name string) *Counter {
	return &Counter{
		name:    name,
		current: 0,
	}
}

func (e *Counter) Add(value uint64) {
	e.current += value
}

func (e *Counter) Get() uint64 {
	return e.current
}

var counters = make(map[cm.Rep]*Counter)
var lastId = cm.Rep(0)

func init() {
	resourceexampleapi.Exports.Counter.Constructor = func(name string) (result resourceexampleapi.Counter) {
		counter := NewCounter(name)
		id := lastId + 1
		lastId = id
		counters[id] = counter
		return resourceexampleapi.CounterResourceNew(id)
	}

	resourceexampleapi.Exports.Counter.Destructor = func(id cm.Rep) {
		delete(counters, id)
	}

	resourceexampleapi.Exports.Counter.Add = func(id cm.Rep, value uint64) {
		counters[id].Add(value)
	}

	resourceexampleapi.Exports.Counter.Get = func(id cm.Rep) uint64 {
		return counters[id].Get()
	}
}

Is this how it is supposed to work or am I missing something?
The new binding generator version is much nicer than the previous one in many ways, but having to manually keep track of resources seems weird to me.

Dominant language
Go
Stars
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Forks
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PR merge metrics
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