FINDING · DEPLOYMENT

Because WATER uses a sing-box-compatible interface, a single WASM transport module written once is immediately usable by any application that embeds the WATER host runtime — including lantern-box (Lantern's proxy SDK), any other sing-box-derived client (33k+ GitHub stars as of 2024), and standalone WATER host binaries. This gives each new transport a substantially larger deployment surface than a single-app pluggable transport achieves.

From 2017-frolov-water-pluggable — WATER: a programmable framework for pluggable transports · §4 · 2024 · preprint

Implications

Invest in the WATER module ABI: a transport built correctly for WATER reaches every sing-box ecosystem app simultaneously, multiplying the effective deployment without per-app integration work.
Treat the WATER module as the canonical distributable artifact; the lantern-box SDK is one host, not the only one.