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Lucet: Native WebAssembly Compiler and Runtime

fastly.com

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Re: Lucet: Native WebAssembly Compiler and Runtime

#6

Post by phickey »

arcatek wrote: post #3
phickey wrote: post #2

Author here- happy to take questions.

What would you say are the current main limitations of this approach? What is Lucet not meant to be good at?

At the moment, a lot of WASM tooling assumes instances interact with a JS engine. So, we aren't compatible with a bunch of existing tooling, like Rust's wasm-bindgen. We're working on our own tool to fill that hole in the ecosystem.

We also aren't 100% of the way to spec compliance yet. We have a plan to get there, but spent the last year or so putting the bulk of our effort into performance and integration with our edge cloud systems.

Re: Lucet: Native WebAssembly Compiler and Runtime

#7

Post by phickey »

azakai wrote: post #5

> With Lucet, Fastly’s edge cloud can execute tens of thousands of WebAssembly programs simultaneously, in the same process , without compromising security. [emphasis mine] How does it handle Spectre, etc.?

We have a security document that addresses the big picture, and this specific concern as well: https://github.com/fastly/lucet/blob/master/SECURITY.md#cave... For speculative execution, we don't yet implement all of the mitigations possible in Lucet, but will in the near future.

Re: Lucet: Native WebAssembly Compiler and Runtime

#8

Post by phickey »

sansnomme wrote: post #4

How does Lucet's WebAssembly performance compare to LuaJIT (one of the fastest JITs in existence) right now including VM warm-up time? Also, what's the GUI story like outside of browsers?

I have not compared it to LuaJIT, but given that Lucet uses an AOT architecture, its hard to make a fair comparison.

There is no GUI story yet, but Lucet provides a WASI (https://wasi.dev) implementation, so as that standard evolves, we may be able to support GUIs through those interfaces.

Re: Lucet: Native WebAssembly Compiler and Runtime

#9

Post by kbumsik »

phickey wrote: post #2

Author here- happy to take questions.

I didn't know about WASI before and it looks great. As a C/C++ dev, one of my concerns about WASM was that most of native WASM runtimes are interfacing towards Emscripten which is not quite standardized.

Do you expect WASI will soon replace the current Emscripten exports interfaces?

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