WANTED is Public: The Repo, the Docs, and What's Actually Built

calendar Jun 16, 2026 · 3 min read · edge-computing embedded iot webassembly  ·
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Overview

Last post I laid out the uncomfortable truth: you wouldn't deploy your backend as a single statically-linked binary on an unpatched server — yet that's exactly how we treat the µCs running our homes and factories. I argued that the monolith brings fragility, operational friction, and a codebase nobody wants to touch.

I said there was an alternative, and that it would be public soon.

It is public now.

The repository and the docs

I'd rather show you what's solid, what's half-built, and what's still a sketch than dress a side-project runtime up as a finished product. So here's the whole thing, warts and all — engine source, the test suite, and the sample Wapp builds:

  • mekops-labs/wanted-engine

It's Apache 2.0 — fork it, ship it, vendor it into something bigger; no license friction with the rest of the cloud-native stack.

For a runtime nobody's seen yet, the docs matter as much as the code, so they went up alongside it — architecture, the runtime spec, the Sheriff control plane, and the capability model:

That landing page is the canonical reference for the rest of this series.

The stack

WANTED is more than the runtime; it's a full stack for edge autonomy, in three layers:

  1. Runtime: A WebAssembly Micro Runtime (WAMR)-based engine that provides a sandboxed, capability-gated environment for application code.
  2. Supervisor (Sheriff): An on-device control-plane agent that manages the Wapp lifecycle, enforces resource limits, and reconciles desired state against the physical reality of the device (will also be public soon).
  3. Cloud (Marshal/Deputy): The control-plane layer, currently in design. Marshal targets Kubernetes-native GitOps orchestration; Deputy is a lightweight standalone binary for local orchestration with no cluster dependencies — a single binary with a web UI and optional MQTT Discovery for Home Assistant users.

The honesty table

This is a one-person project in active early development, so here's what actually compiles and passes CI today versus what's still a branch or a sketch — no roadmap theater:

State Components
Built & merged VFS router (namespace isolation), TarFS + OCI layered images, WAMR 2.4.4 classic-interpreted runtime, Linux platform, NuttX simulation target (CI-gated, functional selftest suite), named-pipe IPC, per-wapp console driver, WASI args/environ passthrough, the on-device Sheriff supervisor (initial control-plane primitives) - currently in compiled wasm form in repo, but source code will be available.
In progress NuttX ESP32 hardware, the Sheriff reconciliation loop, Deputy and Marshal control planes (in design).
Research Checkpoint/Restore, delta OTA, Execute-In-Place (XIP) from Flash, RISC-V target support.

Try it today

No exotic hardware required: clone it, build on Linux, and have a "hello from the edge" Wapp running in a few minutes. The Quickstart walks the whole loop — compile to wasm32-wasi, package it into an OCI image, and launch it through the control plane.

What's coming

This was orientation. The next posts go subsystem by subsystem, bytecode up:

  • Part 3: WebAssembly on Bare Metal
  • Part 4: Hardware as Files: The VFS Capability Model
  • Part 5: OCI Images on an RTOS
  • Part 6: The Control Plane
  • Part 7: Real Deployments
  • Part 8: Checkpoint/Restore

Star the repo if it's useful, follow the series, and open an issue when I get something wrong — this is the edge infrastructure I wanted and couldn't buy, built in the open.

Posts in this series