Extending homeserver functionality with WASM

[olanod]

Application Services are a great way to extend the functionality of a homeserver, however they are relatively heavy-weight and make deployments more complex the more we want to supercharge the homeserver as every new piece of "functionality" means manually configuring a new trusted appservice that requires its own process or a whole different server to operate properly.

I'm currently prototyping an appservice that acts like a shell, it doesn't provide functionality out of the box, instead it allows the admin installing WebAssebly plugins later on. We want to offer easy to deploy homeservers that are extensible and having to configure just a single general purpose appservice is already a great improvement but it would be more interesting if said plugin system could be more integrated in the homeserver to for example allow single binary deployments and reduce the overhead that comes with serializing and passing data between the homeserver and appservice.

Glad to hear opinions and thoughts about integrating a WASM runtime in homeservers :)

[MTRNord]

I am split on this as it kinda sounds like smart contracts, but also I think if done right it may be interesting. So just leaving this as a comment instead of upvoting. :)