Add support for Octave

[ctaggart]

Same as #539, but for Octave https://www.gnu.org/software/octave/. Octave is a popular and partly compatible alternative to MATLAB. I'll be using it in the machine learning course I'm taking https://www.coursera.org/learn/machine-learning/. The preferred extension point is C++ oct.h and would require GPL. Octave doesn't support loadlibrary like MATLAB does. However, it would be great to see if it is possible to come up with a loadwasm for it too. cc @mtmiller

[Hywan]

I think it's better to discuss in #539 about a possible API in MATLAB, and next, see whether we start an integration in MATLAB or Octave (if it happens).

[mtmiller]

Octave doesn't support loadlibrary like MATLAB does

Octave should learn how to loadlibrary. Maybe that would be better than an Octave specific extension here?

[ctaggart]

@mtmiller It would be cool if Octave supported loadlibrary. I was hoping to base a loadwasm on the loadlibrary code if it existed. My current interest before figuring out where wasmer fits in is to just get native rust extensions working. I've got them compiling, but crashing Octave. https://github.com/ctaggart/octh

[Hywan]

@mtmiller Or… you can add extensions support through Wasm directly. Would you be interested by such an approach?

[mtmiller]

@Hywan I'm personally not interested in nor know anything about wasm at the moment, just here to help with any Octave issues.

[ctaggart]

I actually figured out got native Octave extensions built with Rust working on Linux with the latest from https://github.com/ctaggart/octh. However, mapping the C++ API to Rust is not super easy. I think a better solution would be to create another plugin system on top of the wasmer C API.

http://adventures.michaelfbryan.com/posts/wasm-as-a-platform-for-abstraction/ https://docs.rs/crate/wasmer-runtime-c-api/

~I'll echo these thoughts on the Octave dev mailing list.~ However, I'm not the right one to do the work for it. Octave work is currently only academic for me and I'm not interested in coding in C++.

[Hywan]

There is a new C API, https://docs.rs/wasmer-c-api/. Maybe this one is easier.

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