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Rotifer Protocol
Rotifer Protocol

Posted on Originally published at rotifer.dev

Rotifer v0.8.6: Four CLI fixes, and installing no longer needs Rust

#cli #webassembly #rust #devtools

Written up on 2026-10-19. v0.8.6 shipped on 2026-04-21 with a changelog entry but no blog post at the time.

v0.8.6 does two things. It fixes four CLI problems you could hit in everyday use, and it puts prebuilt native binaries into npm, so installing no longer compiles Rust on your machine.

@rotifer/playground v0.8.6 is available on npm.

Four fixes

async genes no longer crash

If a gene's express() was written as async, the runtime used to crash with an opaque "Pending jobs in the event queue". The compile step now detects async usage and reports a clear error that tells you where the problem is.

Edit the source and rotifer compile recompiles

After editing index.ts, rotifer compile could silently reuse the old gene.wasm, so your change never made it in. It now detects source changes and recompiles.

irHash no longer breaks the native execution path

Genes whose phenotype.json carried an irHash field failed on the native (wasmtime) execution path because of a format mismatch. That is fixed.

Trivial workloads no longer hit "fuel exhausted"

The WASM sandbox's default limits went up: fuel from 1M to 500M, memory to 256 MiB, timeout to 60 s. Genes compiled with Javy/QuickJS could previously run out of fuel even on very simple work.

Installing no longer needs Rust

The core of @rotifer/playground is a native module written in Rust. Before this release, installing on some platforms needed a local Rust toolchain to build it on the spot.

From v0.8.6 on, prebuilt native binaries ship through platform-specific npm packages:

  • @rotifer/playground-darwin-arm64 (Apple silicon Mac)
  • @rotifer/playground-darwin-x64 (Intel Mac)
  • @rotifer/playground-linux-x64-gnu (Linux x64)
  • @rotifer/playground-win32-x64-msvc (Windows x64)

Run npm install as usual and npm picks the one that fits your machine. There is nothing extra to do.

See the changelog for the full list. All of these fixes carry forward into later releases, so just install the latest:

npm install -g @rotifer/playground@latest
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This article was originally published on rotifer.dev. Follow the project on GitHub or install the CLI: npm i -g @rotifer/playground.

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