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).
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
> 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.)
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.
For sandboxing in JS, we can use a sandboxed iframes or webworkers. Both of those communicate to hosted code via postmessage which serializes an object and that object can be used for function call.
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 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.
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.
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.
OK, OK, it’s a bad example. WASM is language agnostic though, so as more languages can target WASM, then the possible advantage is programming language agnosticism. If I have some code, I don’t have to re-write it in Lua.
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.
> 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:
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.
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).
> 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.
That's what reference types (the Wasm proposal) are for, GC builds on top of that.
Sharing GC data between wasm modules is supported, yes. You just need to define the types identically on both sides, and things work.
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 :))
> 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/...
shape.faces().farthest(Direction::PosZ)
nice. is this original from openscad (if that even is your inspiration)?
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.
What do you mean? Wasmer isn't a web frontend tech
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.
Would this allow to safely eval Node.js code in a sandbox?
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.
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?...
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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.)
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
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’s what it is.
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 a sandboxed iframes or webworkers. Both of those communicate to hosted code via postmessage which serializes an object and that object can be used for function call.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
Yeah, but the plugins can be written in Rust!
OK, OK, it’s a bad example. WASM is language agnostic though, so as more languages can target WASM, then the possible advantage is programming language agnosticism. If I have some code, I don’t have to re-write it in Lua.
yea https://blog.cloudflare.com/announcing-wasi-on-workers/ and such.
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.
> 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...
ONNX has a WASM backend for running models in a browser. It’s what transformer.js (from HuggingFace) uses behind the scenes.
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).
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.
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.
Cool! Thanks! I've got none of that.
Is Wasmer still openly adversarial wrt the Bytecode Alliance?
Sorry to be that guy but what's the business model for all these web assembly runtime companies?
This one runs their own serverless platform that you can deploy your WASM apps to, but their pricing is... vague.
God, please stop using random AI-generated images in a release post..
What is the issue with AI-generated images? Just being overdone in general? Or ethical concerns?
Makes your article looks cheap like a random blogspam. My personal opinion, obviously.