Non string keys

[olanod]

There are many use-cases that would benefit from having a key-value store where keys are not strings but opaque bytes, would there be a particular reason why the type key needs to be string?

[Mossaka]

I have experimented with a few keyvalue stores (dynamodb, redis, azure cosmos db) and they all seem to accept key as strings. Could you please list a few use cases where the keys are non-strings? I am happy to change the key type

[olanod]

I'd use it for embedded use cases for example, sometimes directly store the bytes or abstract it to use data structures that are encoded automatically to an efficient representation.

[sunfishcode]

Another challenge with byte sequences is that it's not possible to transcode plain bytes to key-value stores which use different character encodings. It looks to me like string is a better fit for the use cases and implementations that originally motivated wasi-keyvalue.

[olanod]

What about supporting both with keys being something like an enum?

[sunfishcode]

With an enum, using wasi-keyvalue with a backend that needs strings would have to always fail when given bytes.

Could you say more about your use case? What kinds of embedded programs would use an external key-value store? What backends would you expect to be used to implement the interface?