Historically, we held off on this feature in wasmCloud due to the security and distributed systems implications
Security: Loading arbitrary bytes off disk is not a production-safe feature
Distributed: The same command is handled differently by different wasmCloud hosts, losing a filesystem if a virtual machine restarts can lead to corrupt environments
After brainstorming, we decided to accept Patrick's PR along with an environment variable that is false by default for loading actors from files. Developer tools like wash up can enable this by default for a local development experience
A nice feature to have after the initial PR would be a wash watch or wash auto command that automatically watches a local actor project for changes and automatically updates the actor (e.g. hot reloading)
We also discussed adding the ability to start wasmCloud actors by transmitting bytes over NATS, so a valid control interface connection can remove the need for a file on disk. This will require more brainstorming and is captured as a task for the wasmCloud maintainers
