Archive this repository?

[abrown]

As I prepare to change projects I'm working on, I decided to review this repository for archiving &emdash; I believe we should archive it. Here's why:

• the AssemblyScript bindings here have been unmaintained for some time
• the Rust bindings here have fallen out of date with the latest specification of wasi-nn
• keeping this up-to-date is a chore that no one wants to take on because...
• the best way to generate and use bindings for any WASI proposal is with wit-bindgen
• this repository requires a bunch of extra work to fix CI, update examples, clean up unused parts, etc.

Some background: back when wasi-nn was first specified with WITX, it was difficult to access the low-level specification APIs. In that world, it made sense to generate the low-level, unsafe bindings to languages like Rust and AssemblyScript and then wrap them with a higher-level API that made it all more developer-friendly. Since then, the adoption of WIT as the IDL for WASI proposals and improvements in tooling (i.e., wit-bindgen) make this "generate and wrap" idea outdated. E.g., in #108 you can see how redirecting users to wit-bindgen is the right approach.

In the past, I kept this alive due to community requests but I will no longer have time to do so. I think now is the right time to archive this project and direct future developers towards wit-bindgen. Here's how I propose to do this:

• leave existing AssemblyScript and Rust packages alone: this avoids breaking any existing users of this repository, who can continue to use them for older versions of wasi-nn (e.g., p1-style)
• rewrite the top-level README to point to this issue, with a "This repository is deprecated, see ...; use wit-bingen instead" message
• remove all other files in main
• archive the repository

[abrown]

CC-ing some previous contributors for comment: @jlb6740, @rahulchaphalkar, @devigned, @asw101, @geekbeast, @CaptainVincent, @yanghaku, @alabulei1, @jianjunz, @TAOFOR4. If someone else wanted to take up maintenance of this repository that would also work!