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WasmEdge

wasmedge.org

11–20 of 88 posts

Re: WasmEdge

#11
I got a bit bewildered by the quick start documentation. It starts by showing how to install and uninstall, followed by running it in different execution environments, it seems to be expecting that you already know what wasmedge is. That's unexpected, as usually a quickstart shows how to write and run a simple application.

Re: WasmEdge

#12
post #9

WasmEdge is one of the most exciting Wasm runtimes out there. It is part of the CNCF and does support a bunch interesting functionality (wasi-nn, integration with Docker via runwasi, etc)

what's the deal with wasi-nn? (who is supporting it?) Seems super high level and somewhat brittle

Re: WasmEdge

#13

Seems like the edge is just SaaS microservices. Change my mind.

I am a maintainer at WasmEdge. :) The name “edge” signifies that it is lightweight. We think it is a lightweight and secure alternative to Linux containers.

The application use cases include containerization on edge devices, serverless functions on edge cloud, embedded functions for databases or SaaS, stream functions for data pipelines, or even smart contracts for blockchains.

All of the above are “edge” use cases in the sense that they are typically outside of mega data centers. :)

Re: WasmEdge

#14
post #4

Seems like the edge is just SaaS microservices. Change my mind.

Can you elaborate on the connection as you see it? I think of edge computing, SaaS, and microservices as independent concerns.

They are all outside of traditional mega data centers. :)

Re: WasmEdge

#15

Given the amount of C++ in this project, I wouldn't run this in an adversarial environment. Meaning, I would not accept untrusted Wasm modules. It is about 100kloc of C/C++ including headers.

I would sincerely be curious to know how many “kloc of C/C++” you are already running in an adversarial environment and how much of a dent this project would make.

Re: WasmEdge

#16

Given the amount of C++ in this project, I wouldn't run this in an adversarial environment. Meaning, I would not accept untrusted Wasm modules. It is about 100kloc of C/C++ including headers.

I am a maintainer of the WasmEdge project. Yes, it is written in C++ for two reasons:

1 C++ apps can run a lot of edge hardware devices and OSes. We are running on RTOS like seL4 and CPUs like RISC-V.

2 There are already two leading Wasm runtimes written in Rust when we started. We thought runtime diversity is important from security and reliability point of view.

It is indeed more challenging to run C++ programs securely. We are participating Google’s OSS-fuzz program.

Of course, for application developers, WasmEdge provides “Rust first” SDKs and APIs. Almost all of our new features are available in the Rust SDK first. :)

Re: WasmEdge

#17
post #12
post #9

WasmEdge is one of the most exciting Wasm runtimes out there. It is part of the CNCF and does support a bunch interesting functionality (wasi-nn, integration with Docker via runwasi, etc)

what's the deal with wasi-nn? (who is supporting it?) Seems super high level and somewhat brittle

Disclaimer: I am a maintainer of WasmEdge. WASI-NN allows Wasm to be a wrapper of native tensor frameworks — very much the same way Python is a wrapper for Tensorflow and PyTorch.

The benefit of using Wasm as a wrapper is its high performance (Use Rust to prepare data) and multi language support (inference in JS!)

WasmEdge supports Tensorflow, PyTorch, and OpenVINO as wasi-NN backends.

Re: WasmEdge

#18

I got a bit bewildered by the quick start documentation. It starts by showing how to install and uninstall, followed by running it in different execution environments, it seems to be expecting that you already know what wasmedge is. That's unexpected, as usually a quickstart shows how to write and run a simple application.

Will improve! Thanks!

One of the challenges is that Wasm supports multiple languages. So, we will have to decide to start from a Rust app or a JS app or something else. Would love your suggestions.

Re: WasmEdge

#20

Interesting to see that it has JavaScript support built in. It seems to be based on QuickJS which will work for some things but as they acknowledge quite slow. > In the end, running v8 in a cloud-native environment often requires a full stack of software tools consisting of "Linux container + guest OS + node or deno + v8", which makes it much heavier and slower than a simple WasmEdge + QuickJS container runtime. http…

I remain mystified about the value of running JS inside a wasm VM. I see why people want to go there, because they want one tool to rule them all, but I don't get the actual value add. WASM hasn't been built for this. Not yet. You'll be running the garbage collector, compiler, bytecode interpreter fully in an emulated environment. There's bound to be overhead. For no reason. (And remember overhead isn't just slow pro…

Disclaimer: I am a maintainer at WasmEdge.

One of the benefits of running JS in Wasm (specifically the QuickJS approach) is that you can create JS APIs in Rust. That allows you to move a lot of compute intensive operations into Rust while still giving your developers a clean and nice JS API. WasmEdge does this with its JS Tensorflow API:

https://wasmedge.org/book/en/write_wasm/js/tensorflow.html

In fact, we are using Rust to support the entire Node.JS API in WasmEdge. :)

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