What if the browser was the server?

https://arthurcornil.com/blog/ship-it-to-the-user/

by quirissum • 2 months ago

4 8 2 months ago

quirissum3• 2 months ago

I explored the idea of shipping a full backend to the user using WASM-compiled Go, SQLite and OPFS. The whole thing is delivered via a URL but runs entirely on the user's machine.

Live Demo: https://localtrack.arthurcornil.com/ GitHub: https://github.com/arthurcornil/localtrack

gamebak• 2 months ago

I think a lot of companies already trying to use this stuff, not SQL related but rather focusing more on the frontend. In reality, this causes more issues, like data fragmentation, versioning between different versions, security and at the end of the day it's a either a dev cost or server cost to implement this.

Usually, server costs are much much cheaper than dev cost to implement all this into FE, but it's a viable thing for the future.

billconan• 2 months ago

how is this different from service worker?

ncruces3• 2 months ago

How's the performance? My Wasm-under-Wasm tests became slow since I transitioned to the wasm2go transpiler, but I wonder if that's an artifact of repeated slow compilation (rather than execution) of tests.

quirissum3• 2 months ago

For my use case (small datasets), query execution feels instant. No perceptible lag between user action and result. Though I haven't done formal benchmarking. The initial load time is the bottleneck, not query execution. Whether that's the transpiler or just the Go runtime overhead I can't say without proper benchmarking.

ncruces3• 2 months ago

Thanks! Yeah, I guess on the web it would always manifest as load time.

But order of magnitude, with everything cached, on a decent laptop/desktop, is it a few seconds, or a minute?

Because what I get from testing in CI is every test takes a minute.

What if the browser was the server?

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