Mozilla has announced a new standardization effort to provide a consistent way for WebAssembly applications to interact with any operating system they run on.

Dubbed WASI, or WebAssembly System Interface, the currently experimental project provides WebAssembly applications with a set of abstractions for performing tasks such as reading and writing files and network I/O. Each WebAssembly host implements WASI for the platform it runs on.

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A key part of WASI, according to Mozilla, is that it is platform-independent. Languages like C provide a standard library to interface with the file system and memory, for example. Similarly, WASI can be thought of as a standard library for cross-platform abstractions like files or network sockets.

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