awesome-wasm-runtimes VS Odin

Firecracker is a fine technology, but serverless companies have started taking advantage Wasm's faster start-up times for use cases of running Wasm on the server (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yqgCxhPAao0). The deny by default security policy makes Wasm a great choice to run your code in isolation, particularly for maximizing hardware resources in the multi-tenant environments these serverless companies operate.

In the past few years, we have seen more use cases of Wasm emerge outside of the browser. JavaScript engines are now just a fraction of the total number of runtimes available. Wasmtime, Wasmer, WasmEdge, wazero are popular ones for non-browser use cases like blockchain, serverless, and edge computing (although Cloudflare uses V8's Wasm engine). WAMR is a popular one for cyber physical/IoT devices. There's a nice list here: https://github.com/appcypher/awesome-wasm-runtimes

There's plenty of other ways to interact with Wasm, most of which are secure. (Wasmtime is the one I'm most familiar with, which is why I linked to it.)

Yeah, this is one of many non-browser runtimes, e.g. see https://github.com/appcypher/awesome-wasm-runtimes

Lunatic is more opinionated than most of these or node, though, in that it's trying to emulate a particular concurrent system design pattern borrowed from Erlang/BEAM.

There's an overview of different WASM runtimes with features: https://github.com/appcypher/awesome-wasm-runtimes

Now, the creation Bytecode Alliance, the development of multiple WebAssembly runtimes and the work of the W3C WebAssembly Community Group is why I belive it will get popular, but the capability-based security model is why I want it to get popular.

⚖ I think it's really cool that a plugin author could compile their C++ to .wasm such that a single plugin binary can run on either Linux or Windows (don't need an x86 .dll, x64 .dll, x86 .so, x64 .so...) and in a sandbox (no arbitrary syscalls or Win32 calls, just the interfaces given to it), while still getting near native AOT speed. Though, it's hard to judge which one to choose from now with all the wasm engines that are available (https://github.com/appcypher/awesome-wasm-runtimes), with wasmtime or inNative being two others I've considered for my project. I'll definitely look into this one though, given it supports many of the newer proposals.

Numerous native runtimes for webassembly already exist[0], with the current popular choices apparently being Wasmer[1] and Wasmtime[2].

All one would need to do (AFAIK) is ship a client for all major platforms, as is done with Electron (and web browsers themselves, and everything else.)

[0]https://github.com/appcypher/awesome-wasm-runtimes

There's also Odin[0] too. I tried using them all and Odin was pretty nice. Nim is also good too but a lot more features.

But - I concluded that language matters a lot less compared to APIs. Yes, the language should have enough good features to let the programmers express themselves, but overall well designed APIs matter a lot more than language. For example -tossing most of the C stdlib and following a consistent coding style (similar to one described here -[1]), with using Arenas for memory allocation, I can be just as productive in C.

[0] - https://odin-lang.org

I highly recommend looking at:

* The Overview: <https://odin-lang.org/docs/overview/>

* examples/demo: <https://github.com/odin-lang/Odin/blob/master/examples/demo/...>

As for the first example: a basic lexing example is probably boring, but it does show some basic ideas of what the language is about. If people want to write better examples or just reorder the current ones, please feel free to make an issue or PR on the website's GitHub page: <https://github.com/odin-lang/odin-lang.org>.

I use Odin primarily, it’s C-level but pascal/Go syntax and inspiration https://odin-lang.org/

Website: https://odin-lang.org/

Get it from the website: https://odin-lang.org/ -- Odin includes bindings to popular gamedev libraries & APIs such as Raylib, SDL, DirectX, OpenGL and Vulkan.