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Wasmer 2.2

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Re: Wasmer 2.2

#21

Post by syrusakbary »

mastax wrote: post #19

Pretty impressed with the performance of the cranelift and singlepass backends. They've come a long way. I am wondering why the LLVM backend takes so long to compile the TiDb Wasm. Presumably it doesn't take >3 days to compile TiDb from source with llgo and rustc. Why would compiling it to Wasm first make it take way longer to compile than from source?

LLVM compilation times can be for sure improved further, although to be honest we haven't focused on it yet (as this long compilation times are more like an edge case atm).

In general, compiling to Wasm gives you the universality over a chipset or OS. Imagine that you compile TiDB today to Wasm, tomorrow you will be able to run it in chipsets or platforms where it was not available today (RISC-V, for example), without the need of installing a toolchain to rebuild the binary... just with a small runtime like Wasmer.

Re: Wasmer 2.2

#22

Post by syrusakbary »

miohtama wrote: post #20
capableweb wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's how they are connected: https://wasmer.io/posts/wasmer-supercharges-blockchain And a case study: https://wasmer.io/case-studies/confio > Confio's smart contracts allow blockchain developers to add new functionality to their blockchain at runtime. The engineering team at Confio quickly realized that some containerization and sandboxing technology were required to ensure the host machine's safety. WebAssembly wa…

Note that Wasmer’s WebAssembly blockchain ideas are not unique. EOS was the first blockchain to use WebAssembly backend, in 2018 (4 years ago).

I'd like to reinforce this.

Wasmer has not invented the wheel here nor we were the first ones to create a Wasm runtime for the server-side (WAVM should probably have an honorific mention somewhere!).

All our work has been based in some way or another on the shoulders of previous projects from great developers and ecosystems, and for that we will be eternally grateful <3 (examples of this are WAVM, cervous, nebulet, perlin's life and many more!)

Re: Wasmer 2.2

#23

Post by n42 »

Shadonototra wrote: post #17
syrusakbary wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have good news! Wasmer can also be run on the browser. Check out wasmer-js [1] [1] https://github.com/wasmerio/wasmer-js/

node-js? no thanks What's up with Rust people bloating everything?

Do you want to have a conversation, or are you just here to complain?

Re: Wasmer 2.2

#24

Post by [deleted] »

capableweb wrote: post #18
fimdomeio wrote: post #5

Can someone explain me what's the connection between wasmer, web3 and blockchain?

Here's how they are connected: https://wasmer.io/posts/wasmer-supercharges-blockchain And a case study: https://wasmer.io/case-studies/confio > Confio's smart contracts allow blockchain developers to add new functionality to their blockchain at runtime. The engineering team at Confio quickly realized that some containerization and sandboxing technology were required to ensure the host machine's safety. WebAssembly wa…

[deleted]

Re: Wasmer 2.2

#25

Post by WatchDog »

fimdomeio wrote: post #5

Can someone explain me what's the connection between wasmer, web3 and blockchain?

It seems like the whole point of the "singlepass" compiler is to avoid "JIT bombs", which in the context of compiling WASM in a smart-contract blockchain solution, could be a vector for a DOS attack.

If you aren't compiling maliciously crafted WASM programs, then the runtime performance of the cranelift or LLVM compilers would appear to be generally more desirable.

Re: Wasmer 2.2

#26

Post by stevemk14ebr »

Shadonototra wrote: post #15

I never understood the need of such stuff WASM only good for client side web browsers, anything is a pure waste of time and human resources

Wasm is a sandbox first off. Any situation where you want to isolate a computation is an application suitable for wasm. Browser is just one instance of that

Re: Wasmer 2.2

#27

Post by simonw »

Shadonototra wrote: post #15

I never understood the need of such stuff WASM only good for client side web browsers, anything is a pure waste of time and human resources

WASM is exciting for so much more than browsers.

I'm a Python developer. Two needs I have for WASM are:

- I want to use libraries like ffmpeg without first figuring out how to compile them and talk to them through Python bindings. If the JavaScript community have already done the work to compile ffmpeg to WASM then I can use it from Python too - on any platform that has a Python WASM runtime.

- I want a safe sandbox for executing untrusted code - for example, I'd like to build a plugin system for one of my projects where the users of that project can execute code they find on the internet without fear of it 0wning their computer. Sandboxing Python scripts (and Sandboxing for most other languages) is notoriously hard to do safely. WASM offers a rock-solid, widely tested sandbox mechanism.

Re: Wasmer 2.2

#29

Post by ksec »

What am I suppose to compare it against?

It is one thing that 2.2 is 5x or 10x faster than 1.0, but without some well known / understood figures; C, Java or LuaJIT. It is hard to judge the relative performance. I know a lot of these are not fair comparison, but ( as Benedict Evans likes to put it ), relevant comparison. As I would like to know the cost of abstraction and isolation.

Re: Wasmer 2.2

#30

Post by FL33TW00D »

jadbox wrote: post #12
fimdomeio wrote: post #5

Can someone explain me what's the connection between wasmer, web3 and blockchain?

Several blockchains like NEAR are using WASM, but I could only find these resources about blockchains using Wasmer: https://wasmer.io/case-studies/confio https://cosmwasm.com/ "CosmWasm is supporting fourteen different Cosmos projects, including Terra, Regen Network, and Crypto.com"

NEAR has Matklad of rust-analyzer fame onboard as the lead: https://matklad.github.io/resume/ which is quite interesting.
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