Wasmer 5.0

https://wasmer.io/posts/introducing-wasmer-v5

by syrusakbary • 2 years ago

198 82 2 years ago

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 way) to compile to wasm to then run in wasmer? To what benefit? Ok, that's not a good usecase/example

So what is?...

crabmusket2• 2 years ago

Take that API scraping script example. Imagine next you want to build a platform where you run code written by your users who want to e.g. scrape APIs. Think ParseHub I guess? Zapier is another good example.

You'd let them write in Rust or some other language that can target WASM, then you'd run the WASM blobs in a controlled sandboxed execution environment in your platform.

Groxx• 2 years ago

So basically: what every single platform with plugins should be doing to protect their users. Or similar via some other language that allows sandboxing, e.g. Lua.

iknowstuff• 2 years ago

yea https://blog.cloudflare.com/announcing-wasi-on-workers/ and such.

dgfitz• 2 years ago

I cross-compile a native qt app in windows, Mac, and Linux variants. It’s pretty neat to see it compile in wasm as well.

01HNNWZ0MV43FF• 2 years ago

It probably makes sense if you're running untrusted code or handling untrusted data, or running code that was written after the rest of your app

So for a solo dev it doesn't add much, but for a web browser or something that needs plugins it could make a lot of sense.

MuffinFlavored3• 2 years ago

It probably makes sense if you're running untrusted code or handling untrusted data

I never understood this because... I feel like wasm (the standard) is an empty box and a lot of runtimes help you attach things to it / make it useful (able to read/write to filesystem, call the Internet, etc.)

1oooqooq4• 2 years ago

history tells us, that usecase will go out the window as soon as the usual suspects do their usual standards capture by implementation to support something or another related to advertising attribution.

Starlevel004• 2 years ago

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

taberiand• 2 years ago

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

peutetre2• 2 years ago

You can do both of those things in JavaScript.

WebAssembly brings every language to the web and does it with higher performance than JavaScript.

pjmlp• 2 years ago

I am happy with

3) Bring back all the plugins that were taken away.

See no other use for it.

flohofwoe7• 2 years ago

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?

sroussey• 2 years ago

ONNX has a WASM backend for running models in a browser. It’s what transformer.js (from HuggingFace) uses behind the scenes.

xn• 2 years ago

I've used wasm to write web applications in Go that run in the browser, both HTML applications (https://github.com/octoberswimmer/masc) and TUI apps using xterm.js (https://github.com/charmbracelet/bubbletea/pull/887).

LSRegression• 2 years ago

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 - the client can use either a client-side 'server' or connect to a real server. The UI code itself is unchanged in either case.

I suppose the need in this case is that I have code written in a language other than JS and I want to run it in a browser; inversely I could have written the entire project in JS and hosted my backend server on say Node.

globalnode2• 2 years ago

Multiplayer needs a server backend

Did you mean single player? Although perhaps I'm just old and thinking about this in a strange way.

And can I clarify.. your scrabble app is web based already right? connecting to a rust web server for the game logic? And you want to embed that server by compiling to wasm? I probably should go read up on how this works.

tricked• 2 years ago

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

simonask• 2 years ago

I’m using WASM as the modding interface in my game. (I’m using wasmtime from Rust, but same principle.)

Main benefits are isolation, binary portability, and hot reload.

colordrops• 2 years ago

Everyone else has answered about WASM, so I'll answer about raspberry pi. I've got 5 of them. One is running Home Assistant for all my home automation and camera recording. One is running a quadruped that I built. And three are connected to three sets of speakers around the house running a home-rolled Sonos-like setup so I can stream the same music all around the house from my phone.

MuffinFlavored3• 2 years ago

Cool! Thanks! I've got none of that.

csomar• 2 years ago

I think the biggest company using wasm in production is figma (though there might be others). Otherwise, here is an example where wasm shines. Say you have an editor (rvim) and you want to support plugins. Usually, you’ll have a language interpreter and ask developers to develop in this language. With wasm, you can give them the freedom to use whatever stack they want. Then you expose an interface for their wasm artifacts. This abstract the host OS away. Another example is game mods/plugins.

peutetre2• 2 years ago

I think the biggest company using wasm in production is figma (though there might be others)

Amazon uses Rust to wasm for the Prime video app and Google uses Java to wasm for Google Sheets. Both get higher performance and lower memory usage versus JavaScript:

https://www.amazon.science/blog/how-prime-video-updates-its-...

https://web.dev/case-studies/google-sheets-wasmgc

Abode uses wasm in the web based version of Photoshop:

https://medium.com/@addyosmani/photoshop-is-now-on-the-web-3...

0points4• 2 years ago

Wasm could be a handy way of letting users mod your app using their choice of programming language that can compile to wasm. Compare with how lua is used.

ledgerdev• 2 years ago

having V8 as a backend also means supporting WebAssembly Exceptions and Garbage Collection under the hood. Stay tuned for more news on this front soon

Looking forward to this and languages that can make use of wasm-gc.

Does wasm-gc allow sharing of host data/strings across different modules in the same runtime, or is it contained to only single module with repeated calls/invocations? The scenario I am considering would invoke several different modules in a pipeline, pass data between each step in an efficient manner.

throw4950sh06• 2 years ago

That's what reference types (the Wasm proposal) are for, GC builds on top of that.

azakai• 2 years ago

Sharing GC data between wasm modules is supported, yes. You just need to define the types identically on both sides, and things work.

OtomotO• 2 years ago

Interesting.

I am happy with wasmtime though.

Hacking on a wasm component model and wasi based plugin system these days.

Having loads of fun. (I am aware of extism, but I am doing it for the fun :))

bschwindHN2• 2 years ago

Hacking on a wasm component model and wasi based plugin system these days.

Same here! Can you share what you're working on? I'm (slowly) making a 3D CAD modeling API, so you write Rust code to define a model, and compile it to WASM so it can hot-reload and let you iterate faster.

https://github.com/bschwind/opencascade-rs/tree/main/crates/...

1oooqooq4• 2 years ago

shape.faces().farthest(Direction::PosZ)

nice. is this original from openscad (if that even is your inspiration)?

punkpeye• 2 years ago

Would this allow to safely eval Node.js code in a sandbox?

samtheprogram• 2 years ago

Not "Node.js code" specifically as Node.js itself can't be compiled to wasm. JavaScript can be compiled to wasm, but that won't include the whole Node.js standard library and doesn't seem to be what you are asking.

Check out Deno for a sandbox that is getting there. Their new release does (aim to) support most Node.js code, where it previously and intentionally did not support node_modules nor CommonJS to the best of my knowledge.

If you care more about wasm than sandboxing in general, one project called javy is interesting, but you'll quickly notice they bring their own IO library and not much else in terms of something that compares to Node.js' API.

int_19h• 2 years ago

Is Wasmer still openly adversarial wrt the Bytecode Alliance?

spirobelv2• 2 years ago

can you link more infos on the drama pls

SirGiggles• 2 years ago

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

wg02• 2 years ago

Sorry to be that guy but what's the business model for all these web assembly runtime companies?

jsheard• 2 years ago

This one runs their own serverless platform that you can deploy your WASM apps to, but their pricing is... vague.

wg02• 2 years ago

I think it's same docker Inc. all over. A great open source tool but no viable business model.

DustinBrett• 2 years ago

I wish they had a solution that didn't require Cross-Origin Isolated headers. I am still using an older version where that wasn't required.

nextaccountic2• 2 years ago

What do you mean? Wasmer isn't a web frontend tech

nextaccountic2• 2 years ago

Well apparently it is? I am confused https://github.com/wasmerio/wasmer-js

Don't browsers support wasm natively?

thrdbndndn3• 2 years ago

God, please stop using random AI-generated images in a release post..

spretzer• 2 years ago

What is the issue with AI-generated images? Just being overdone in general? Or ethical concerns?

thrdbndndn3• 2 years ago

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

enugu3• 2 years ago

Could this ever function as a less resource intensive substitute for Electron apps? WASM doesn't have DOM access, but could it be added in these extensions?

Edit: Maybe this question doesn't make sense as the OS would need to have the runtime installed, and if that can be assumed, we would have lightweight apps already.

NitpickLawyer2• 2 years ago

Ha e a look at Tauri for a less resource intensive electron alternative. Written in rust and supports any framework on the frontend side, with strong access control & lightweight backend.

yoav• 2 years ago

Take a look at Electrobun. It’s a Tauri alternative where you write typescript instead of rust. App bundles as small as 16MB and it creates update patches for your app as small as 4KB.

Written in zig and Bun, and uses the system webview by default.

skybrian• 2 years ago

These performance graphs are confusing and possibly cursed. Sometimes they're log scale (confusing enough) and others, I have no idea what they're trying to say.

For example, the first graph, labelled "Argon 2", nearly all the bars are the same length, labelled "100" (no units given, apparently log scale) and the individual bars are labelled with entirely different numbers in ms (presumably milliseconds).

thiht2• 2 years ago

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

Alifatisk• 2 years ago

From my understandning, it's a runtime that runs webassembly (wasm). So anything that can be compiled to wasm can be runned with this which means it can be executable everywhere wasmer exists.

flohofwoe7• 2 years ago

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.wasm
    wasmer hello.wasm
    Hello World!

...or of course Zig as Zig compiler :)

    zig -target wasm32-wasi hello.zig
    wasmer hello.wasm
    Hello World!

(not sure if the Rust toolchain comes with builtin WASI support, but probably yes).

...or instead of wasmer use another WASI runtime:

- https://github.com/wasmerio/awesome-wasi?tab=readme-ov-file#...

...this is probably the best part of WASM and WASI, there's no 'vendor lock-in'.

thiht2• 2 years ago

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 :)

syrusakbary• 2 years ago

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 :)

mike_r_parsons2• 2 years ago

I really don't know what problem(s) this solves. Don't all the javascript runtimes already have wasm engines built into the runtimes?

flohofwoe7• 2 years ago

You don't need to carry around a whole Javascript engine when all you want is running some WASM/WASI code. Granted, the real-world differences aren't all that big:

    - wasmer: single 45 MByte exe
    - wasmtime: single 28 MByte exe
    - node.js: 87 MByte, lots of individual files
    - deno: 186 MByte over two executables (deno and denort not sure what denort is though)

As an extreme outlier, there's wasm3 which is a WASI interpreter and which is just a single 255 KB executable (not a typo).

All sizes looked up on an ARM Mac.

mike_r_parsons2• 2 years ago

Is this (size) an issue in the real world?

0points4• 2 years ago

I'm having a really hard time reading the performance graps.

The thousand separator comma and dot are both used (which is not correct in any part of the world), and precision is being randomly rounded to 1, 2 or 3 digits.

v3ss0n• 2 years ago

Ok where to use it? Anybody using it? How it gives benefit over docker?

flohofwoe7• 2 years ago

Not specific to wasmer, but WASI runtimes are much more lightweight than Docker, especially on Windows or macOS.

For instance on macOS, a wasmer installation is a single 45 MByte executable, the alternative wasmtime is 28 MBytes, and if performance doesn't matter much, the wasm3 WASI interpreter is a 255 KBytes(!) executable - compared to that, a macOS Docker installation is 1.5 GBytes (and that doesn't even include any docker images).

WASI itself can also be used in places where Docker doesn't make sense, for instance in this VSCode extension I'm using a C cmdline tool compiled to a 209 KB WASI blob:

https://github.com/floooh/vscode-kcide

Wasmer 5.0

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