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Wasmer 5.0

wasmer.io

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Re: Wasmer 5.0

#71

Post by flohofwoe »

Starlevel004 wrote: post #9
MuffinFlavored wrote: post #2

Cool release! I've yet to personally find a good use case for wasm in any project, kind of the same way I'm not quite sure what to do with a bunch of Raspberry Pis It fills a need, I just don't know who/what has that need. Example: Say I write a bunch of Rust async projects for fun. Scraping APIs, etc. How/why would I choose wasm/wasmer to do that instead? I'd do it in Rust (awkwardly/in some specific non-standard wa…

WASM has two primary usages: 1) Making canvas webapps with unblockable ads built-in 2) Downloading and running random blobs of other people's code in a sandbox

> 1) Making canvas webapps with unblockable ads built-in

Which isn't any different from Javascript if you choose to embed the ads right into the Javascript code - but nobody does this because it doesn't make any sense.

In reality, a WASM app that displays ads would also need to load the ad content over one of the existing ad-network mafias (serving ads any other way simply doesn't make any financial sense), and those HTTP requests initiated by a WASM blob (by calling out into JS - because that's the only way in browsers) will be blocked just as fine by existing ad-blockers.

...but I'm also not actually aware of any webpage that does this (trying to defeat ad-blockers via wasm), do you have any example?

Re: Wasmer 5.0

#72

Post by flohofwoe »

NitpickLawyer wrote: post #52
thrdbndndn wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Makes your article looks cheap like a random blogspam. My personal opinion, obviously.

What's the difference between this and a generic photo from one of the dozens stock photo catalogs? Is this somehow "cheaper" because it's "AI" generated? Using stock photos is also cheap (free or cents per)... Second, does anyone really care? Has anyone spent more than half a second looking at a generic picture on an unrelated article? Does the generic hoodie hacker look good on security articles? Or the earth with…

> What's the difference between this and a generic photo from one of the dozens stock photo catalogs?

None really, using a stock photo in a blog post is also a stupid idea. Just don't add any image if it isn't needed to get an important point across.

Re: Wasmer 5.0

#73

Post by thiht »

flohofwoe wrote: post #68
thiht wrote: post #58

I have a hard time understanding what Wasmer does from their landing page. I understand it runs everything everywhere, unbound and above the cloud, but what does it do ? From the name it seems like a very dev oriented product, and I can’t find a single technical word, just buzzwords

It's a runtime for WASI blobs (basically a WASM based standard for crossplatform command line tools), for instance: emcc hello.c -o hello.wasm wasmer hello.wasm Hello World! This uses Emscripten as C compiler, but alternatively you can use the wasi-sdk toolchain instead of Emscripten to build WASI blobs: - https://github.com/WebAssembly/wasi-sdk ...or Zig as C compiler: zig cc -target wasm32-wasi hello.c -o hello.was…

> It's a runtime for WASI blobs (basically a WASM based standard for crossplatform command line tools)

Thanks! I wish this was the subtitle on their homepage :)

Re: Wasmer 5.0

#74

Post by flohofwoe »

thiht wrote: post #73
flohofwoe wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a runtime for WASI blobs (basically a WASM based standard for crossplatform command line tools), for instance: emcc hello.c -o hello.wasm wasmer hello.wasm Hello World! This uses Emscripten as C compiler, but alternatively you can use the wasi-sdk toolchain instead of Emscripten to build WASI blobs: - https://github.com/WebAssembly/wasi-sdk ...or Zig as C compiler: zig cc -target wasm32-wasi hello.c -o hello.was…

> It's a runtime for WASI blobs (basically a WASM based standard for crossplatform command line tools) Thanks! I wish this was the subtitle on their homepage :)

I mean, it's a Californian tech startup, what did you expect ;)

Anything that isn't "earth-shattering" and "world-changing" would be too pedestrian, especially when your product is essentially a simple cmdline tool for coders (a very useful tool of course but not exactly "glamorous").

Re: Wasmer 5.0

#75

Post by syrusakbary »

thiht wrote: post #58

I have a hard time understanding what Wasmer does from their landing page. I understand it runs everything everywhere, unbound and above the cloud, but what does it do ? From the name it seems like a very dev oriented product, and I can’t find a single technical word, just buzzwords

Thanks for the feedback! I'm Syrus, from Wasmer. We are currently working on redesigning the homepage so its easier to know what we do and what is our business value. Stay tuned :)

Re: Wasmer 5.0

#76

Post by tricked »

LSRegression wrote: post #20
MuffinFlavored wrote: post #2

Cool release! I've yet to personally find a good use case for wasm in any project, kind of the same way I'm not quite sure what to do with a bunch of Raspberry Pis It fills a need, I just don't know who/what has that need. Example: Say I write a bunch of Rust async projects for fun. Scraping APIs, etc. How/why would I choose wasm/wasmer to do that instead? I'd do it in Rust (awkwardly/in some specific non-standard wa…

A toy project, but I'm working on a Scrabble clone for my mother to play. There's singleplayer against an AI, and then multiplayer against other people (myself, mostly). Multiplayer needs a server backend with all the game logic which I have programmed in Rust, but there's no reason I can't have the game logic for singleplayer running entirely in the browser. By compiling my backend code to WASM I basically do that -…

i did almost the exact same thing except i wanted the client to enforce the same logic as the server would without having to do api request on every action or having 2 implementations so i just compiled the library code to wasm and that way both the server and the client share the same logic

Re: Wasmer 5.0

#77

Post by mrugiero »

enugu wrote: post #49
peutetre wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can do both of those things in JavaScript. WebAssembly brings every language to the web and does it with higher performance than JavaScript.

For sandboxing in JS, we can use sandboxed iframes or webworkers. Both of those communicate to hosted code via postmessage which serializes an object and this can be used as a base for implementing function calls. Whereas if I understand correctly, WASM can be provided with host approved JS functions to call directly in importObject. This seems more convenient and fast. But for a plugin system, many people would pref…

> But for a plugin system, many people would prefer to write plugins in JS itself, so for WASM plugins, they might have to be compiled to WASM first. Dont know how if there is a mature implementation of JS->WASM.

Not everyone tho, which is kinda the point of abstracting away your language for plugins. People like Python, Lua, Go, Rust, etc... Some do like JS of course, but not everybody. Re: mature implementations, I would guess worst case QuickJS probably can compile to WASM and it's small enough that your runtime will probably offset the extra blob size.

Re: Wasmer 5.0

#78

Post by mrugiero »

1oooqooq wrote: post #45
taberiand wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair, a rock-solid sandbox with extremely well defined and host controlled ingress/egress in a tiny package sounds absolutely fantastic

that would have been implement in something like forward only language like ebpf. wasm is just an outgrown hack that people are hopping will be that safe sandbox and solve all JavaScript problems. do not fool yourself with this temporary feature. wasm was first for js performance. secondly for portability. and third and accidentally for sandbox.

> that would have been implement in something like forward only language like ebpf. wasm is just an outgrown hack that people are hopping will be that safe sandbox and solve all JavaScript problems.

It's funny that every time an article on new functionality for eBPF appears in LWN everybody is like "why don't they just use WASM???". More seriously, a forward only language is by definition too strict for the general case of sandboxing, unless you mean using it only for hooking the syscalls rather than as a target for your program. In particular, the Linux implementation caps your execution to 1M instructions, which is not a lot for something you'd want on your browser.

Re: Wasmer 5.0

#79

Post by SirGiggles »

spirobelv2 wrote: post #59
int_19h wrote: post #25

Is Wasmer still openly adversarial wrt the Bytecode Alliance?

can you link more infos on the drama pls

Most prolific example was this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30758651

Not a big one, but this was of personal note: https://github.com/bytecodealliance/wit-bindgen/issues/306

Re: Wasmer 5.0

#80

Post by enugu »

mrugiero wrote: post #77
enugu wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For sandboxing in JS, we can use sandboxed iframes or webworkers. Both of those communicate to hosted code via postmessage which serializes an object and this can be used as a base for implementing function calls. Whereas if I understand correctly, WASM can be provided with host approved JS functions to call directly in importObject. This seems more convenient and fast. But for a plugin system, many people would pref…

> But for a plugin system, many people would prefer to write plugins in JS itself, so for WASM plugins, they might have to be compiled to WASM first. Dont know how if there is a mature implementation of JS->WASM. Not everyone tho, which is kinda the point of abstracting away your language for plugins. People like Python, Lua, Go, Rust, etc... Some do like JS of course, but not everybody. Re: mature implementations, I…

Javy project seems more active.
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