Spin 3.0 supports polyglot development using Wasm components

Fermyon has released Spin 3.0, a major update to its open source developer tool for building serverless WebAssembly applications. The new release introduces polyglot programming to ease development.

The update to Fermyon’s Spin framework was introduced November 11. Installation instructions can be found on developer.fermyon.com.

Spin 3.0 introduces a workflow for polyglot programming that leverages component dependencies. This functionality is intended to make it seamless to perform tasks such as writing a library for a compute-intensive task in Rust and using it as a dependency in a JavaScript application. Component dependencies can be stored, discovered, and fetched from OCI registries, giving developers an experience akin to npm, NuGet, or crates.io but for Wasm, Fermyon said.

Spin 3.0 also includes an experimental flag, spin up --component-id, that lets developers specify which components to run from a Spin application, and it features deeper integration with WASI (WebAssembly System Interface) standards Spin 3.0, bringing support for the WASI Key-Value and WASI Config APIs. This support is a step toward bringing into Spin WASI cloud core, a WASI proposal for standardizing a set of APIs that applications can use to interact with a common set of cloud services.

Spin 3.0 also introduces support for OpenTelemetry (OTel) observability in Spin applications, enabling Spin application observability with popular tools such as Grafana, Jaegar, and Prometheus.

Finally, the release also features a major refactor of Spin internals with a feature called Spin Factors, where a “factor” encapsulates a host functionality feature. Spin Factors allow the Spin runtime to be more modular, Fermyon said.

Spin is positioned as a framework for building and running fast, secure, and composable cloud-based microservices with WebAssembly. Spin 3.0 follows Spin 2.0, introduced a year ago and focused on the developer experience and runtime performance. Spin 1.0 arrived in March 2022.