Add support for MATLAB

[ctaggart]

MATLAB has loadlibrary feature that is capable of loading C libraries. It would amazing if a loadwasm extension could be created that allows loading a wasm library instead. It would be a lot easier to create and much more portable among the support MATLAB runtimes. It would give MATLAB authors access to a ton more data.

[Hywan]

Hello :-),

Thanks for the suggestion! That's indeed a fun idea. Do you if the C API needs anything special to work with MATLAB?

We already provide a C API (https://github.com/wasmerio/wasmer/tree/master/lib/runtime-c-api) but I guess what you need, is WebAssembly exported functions as C functions, so that they can be called seamlessly from MATLAB, is that correct?

Can you provide me an example of an API you would like to use please?

[ctaggart]

It may make sense to make this one a commercially licensed option. MATLAB licenses are expensive. The current https://www.mathworks.com/pricing-licensing.html shows $860 USD for a Standard Edition Annual License. Unfortunately, I don't have access to MATLAB right now, so I'll be using Octave #540 for my course work. When I was working for a ML startup, I had access to MATLAB. An extension like this would be very useful for a ton of scenarios.

mex.h is a C API that allows you to dynamically get and call function. Googling just now, this slidedeck looks like a good overview.

About 3 years ago, I generated Rust bindings for mex.h, which you can see at https://github.com/ctaggart/mex-sys/blob/master/src/lib.rs. I put some example usage in https://github.com/ctaggart/mex-sys/issues/2, but actually got more than just that working.

Just like the go wasmer, it be awesome it could load "simple.wasm" and call the sum function.

[syrusakbary]

That's a very interesting approach.

Since you already have some experience with MATLAB/Octave would you like to begin the project and perhaps we can help on the C API side? I would love to see support of Wasmer there as well! :)

[Hywan]

@ctaggart Any news from your side?

PS: The new documentation for wasmer-c-api is here, https://docs.rs/wasmer-c-api/.

[ctaggart]

A lot has changed in the last two years. I'm no longer interested in this.

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[stale[bot]]

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