async-wormhole VS lunatic

Taking onto such a big project can be scary and overwhelming, so I like to "cheat" a bit. Instead of developing a M:N scheduler I picked an already mature and proven one from the Rust ecosystem: tokio. Then I just needed to develop a virtual stacks solution that works well with the scheduler. Instead of inventing my own byte-code I just picked WebAssembly, it's just a small abstraction above machine code and has mature JIT compiler libraries that generate code close to native speed. Then again, I just needed to figure out how to do reduction counting and insert preemption points into WebAssembly code during loading.

Previously, we used our own implementation of virtual stacks and stack switching. Both (Wasmer & Wasmtime) Wasm runtimes we used internally required a tight integration with it, but neither library exposed the primitives to integrate well with it. So we needed to maintain forks of both runtimes with some patches to expose internal data structures. Just keeping up to date with new releases was taking way too much of my time. Stack switching is also a delicate task with a lot of hand written assembly involved and we would run into segfaults from time to time. Luckily Wasmtime shipped "native" async support that works similar to our implementation so we could switch to it. Re-writing was a pain, but I'm happy how everything has turned out and think that it was worth it.

Under the hood, Lunatic wraps "processes" inside of Rust async tasks with https://github.com/bkolobara/async-wormhole and can use any async executor to run them. We are currently using Smol's multithreaded executor, so it scales quite nicely across cores.

This reminds me of Lunatic [1], an Erlang-inspired runtime for WebAssembly. Unfortunately it seems like development stalled some months ago.

[1] https://lunatic.solutions/

you can check out https://github.com/lunatic-solutions/lunatic for that

Very cool, and the approach demonstrated might be of interest to a similar problem we have in Ambient (our WASM game runtime that has competing processes that may need to retry interactions.)

That being said - what’s the relation to Lunatic [0]? Are you still working on Lunatic? Is this a side project? Or is it something completely separate?

[0]: https://lunatic.solutions/

Curious too. I follow Lunatic [0] as a candidate for future use, and also wasmCloud [1].

[0] https://lunatic.solutions/

[1] https://wasmcloud.com

Check out Lunatic https://lunatic.solutions/

There's a couple of Rust libs and frameworks inspired on Erlang in 'best of both worlds' attempts, such as https://lunatic.solutions

I found others like Lunatic before, but cannot remember right now.

There is a really good initiative called Lunatic : https://lunatic.solutions/