`alloc()` function about wasi-experimental-http

[radu-matei]

Is there an example of a Zig project that does that?
I'd very much like to learn about how that works.

[jedisct1]

Hi!

All of them :) https://ziglang.org/documentation/0.7.1/#Memory

There is no such thing as a global allocator.

Application can choose whatever they want every time a function requiring dynamic allocation is called. Such an allocator can be a preallocated fixed buffer, an arena, a debugging allocator, etc. This gives a lot of control and allows for very efficient memory usage.

We did something similar at Fastly; I wrote a blurb about this: https://www.fastly.com/blog/webassembly-memory-management-guide-for-c-rust-programmers

[jedisct1]

But maybe an alternative would be for the guest to provide a fixed-size buffer, as well as the size.

The req() function is then called repeatedly, filling the buffer in a streaming fashion, similar to a traditional read() system call, and returning 0 when the end of the stream is reached.

This allows the guest to do whatever they want in order to store the incoming data.

[radu-matei]

#43 was merged, which no longer required an alloc function to be exported.
Closing.