A new commercial cloud platform was announced this week (Web2, NOT decentralized) that runs only WASM and has persistent memory. They are looking for more languages and I thought of Motoko. Rust is supported of course. Looks like Motoko would need WIT bindings and to fully support the webassembly component model. Lack of libraries aside, if Motoko got even a small amount of traction there (and/or elsewhere), it would be a nice ramp over to the IC when they need decentralization. Just a thought.
The team that develops Golem has a deep background in functional programming and makes a popular functional effects library for Scala.
to clarify, it runs on existing clouds, AWS for now.
I didn’t try, but their doc seems to suggest that they can run WASI preview v1 binaries. This is supported by compiling with the -wasi-system-api. IC features are not available in WASI mode though.
WIT is the IDL used by WASI 2 and webassembly components. Motoko would have to work with that to run on Golem or other WASI 2 platforms. Webassembly components are new and still under development. I assume that Candid exists because there was no standard at the time. Anyhow, I just watched the webinar. Golem workers are essentially actors so would fit Motoko at the language level.
They are VERY early and have no interest in decentralization/Web3.