Comment by ignoramous | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ignoramous | Hacker News Reader

Hi ospencer, cohix, nyahmacklindev, and jagger27:

- Could you share some insights on why wasmtime and not wasm3 or wasmer in particular (other than the fact that the bytecodealliance is putting its weight behind wasmtime)?

- What do you make of Cloudflare's / Deno.land's approach of relying on v8 isolates (which can run WASM) versus relying on WASI for the nanoprocess model? Do you think eventually most edge-functions would be WASM-only (as opposed to v8 / firecracker)? Or, are there inherent limitations in the WASM-only approach?

- Azure's Deis Labs (krustlet.dev) has been experimenting a bunch with server-side WASM lately (as are startups such as golioth.io / hotg.ai) and it seems like things are indeed brewing up fast in this space. Any developments you'd particularly recommend folks keep an eye on?

- How did the team get together to work on suborbital?

One look at "What comes after k8s" thread (item?id=27155526) and it is clear most developers here think serverless or an alt k8s (like k0s / k3s / hashicorp nomad) is the way forward. I particularly think WASM is poised to take over serverless itself. So, all the best and hope you folks make it. Thx.

Hello!

> Could you share some insights on why wasmtime and not wasm3 or wasmer in particular

The underlying architecture also supports Wasmer (there's a compiler flag to switch between them), and between the two, Wasmtime is better suited to be statically compiled into the Sat binary, which was a pre-set requirement for this experiment. Wasm3 is also awesome, but Wasmtime does have a performance leg up on Wasm3.

> What do you make of Cloudflare's / Deno.land's approach of relying on v8 isolates (which can run WASM) versus relying on WASI for the nanoprocess model? Do you think eventually most edge-functions would be WASM-only (as opposed to v8 / firecracker)? Or, are there inherent limitations in the WASM-only approach?

I personally believe that eventually the Wasm/WASI-only approach will be very viable, and even today you could run Sat on bare-metal with the right configuration and get very good sandboxing. CloudFlare/Deno are using one of the most natural on-ramps into the Wasm ecosystem, and I think it's a perfectly valid approach that will likely work very well, the V8 code optimizer is no slouch.

> Any developments you'd particularly recommend folks keep an eye on?

The ones you mentioned certainly, as well as wasmCloud, Lunatic, Yew, AssemblyLift, and Fastly's Compute@Edge are all projects to watch in the WebAssembly space.

> How did the team get together to work on suborbital?

Suborbital started as an open source project (Reactr), and is now a startup that focuses the majority of its efforts on open source Wasm tooling/frameworks/etc. I am the founder of said company, and the others are the founding team!

> I particularly think WASM is poised to take over serverless itself. So, all the best and hope you folks make it. Thx.

Thank you, and I agree :)

Hey, co-founder of HOTG.ai here! Nice to see how folks are getting more interested in WASM and deployments. We hadn't specifically targeted the serverless cloud area but we are considering it. We are an edge first company (mobile web, mobile, embedded linux etc). Are you using WASM in production today? If not, why not?

Hi: Yes, we use WASM by the way of Deno-Deploy and Cloudflare Workers but for web & logging workloads. We do not have a specific need for WASM but it speed: It is faster than any other serverless sandboxes (Kata/gVisor/Firecracker/Docker) out there. TinyML is something I keep a keen eye on as that's likely going to be what we would next use serverless for and prefer if it was WASM-able.

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