blueboat VS deno

Right now it is an exciting time for JavaScript. We just got a new shiny fast runtime Bun, with the last new kid Deno being released only 4 years ago, and we have edge computing/serverless runtimes like Cloudflare worker and Blueboat. With all these hypes for the JavaScript community, I could not help but ask, how come only JavaScript gets all these fancy new runtimes? Why don’t we hear these more often in other languages?

Hello HN! I'm building mvsqlite, a distributed variant of SQLite with MVCC transactions, that runs on FoundationDB. It is a drop-in replacement that just needs an `LD_PRELOAD` for existing applications using SQLite.

I made this because [Blueboat](https://github.com/losfair/blueboat) needs a native SQL interface to persistent data. Apparently, just providing a transactional key-value store isn’t enough - it is more easy and efficient to build complex business logic on an SQL database, and it seems necessary to bring a self-hostable distributed SQL DB onto the platform. Since FoundationDB is Blueboat’s only stateful external dependency, I decided to build the SQL capabilities on top of it.

At its core, mvsqlite’s storage engine, mvstore, is a multi-version page store built on FoundationDB. It addresses the duration and size limits (5 secs, 10 MB) of FDB transactions, by handling multi-versioning itself. Pages are fully versioned, so they are always snapshot-readable in the future. An SQLite transaction fetches the read version during `BEGIN TRANSACTION`, and this version is used as the per-page range scan upper bound in future page read requests.

For writes, pages are first written to a content-addressed store keyed by the page's hash. At commit, hashes of each written page in the SQLite transaction is written to the page index in a single FDB transaction to preserve atomicity. With 8K pages and ~60B per key-value entry in the page index, each SQLite transaction can be as large as 1.3 GB (compared to FDB's native txn size limit of 10 MB).

mvsqlite is not yet "production-ready", since it hasn’t received enough testing, and I may still have a few changes to make to the on-disk format. But please ask here if you have any questions!

This sounds quite a bit like Cloudflare Workers, and they have a comparison page - https://github.com/losfair/blueboat/wiki/Comparison-with-Clo....

> If one writes Go or Rust, there are much better ways to run them than targeting WASM

wasm has its place, especially for contained workloads that can be wrapped in its strict capability boundaries (think, file-encoding jobs that shouldn't access anything else but said files: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29112713).

> Containers are still the defacto standard.

wasmedge [0], atmo [1], krustlet [2], blueboat [3] and numerous other projects are turning up the heat [4]!

[0] https://github.com/WasmEdge/WasmEdge

[1] https://github.com/suborbital/atmo

[2] https://github.com/krustlet/krustlet

[3] https://github.com/losfair/blueboat

[4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30155295

NodeJS is the dominant Javascript server runtime environment for Javascript and Typescript (sort of) projects. But over the years, we have seen several attempts to build alternative runtime environments such as Deno and Bun, today’s subject, among others.

https://github.com/denoland/deno/issues is the ideal place -- we try to triage all incoming issues, the more specific the repro the easier it is to address but we will take a look at everything that comes in.

Install Node.js (or Bun, or Deno, or whatever JS runtime you prefer) if it's not there

QUIC is very exciting, after seeing what it can do for performance in Cloudflare network and Cloudflare workers, I can't wait to finally see it in Deno[0] 1.41.

[0] https://github.com/denoland/deno/pull/21942#issuecomment-192...

So as an end user it's kind of like https://deno.com/ where you buy into a runtime + comes prepacked with DBs (k/v stores), scheduling, and deploy stuff?

> by storing Unison code in a database, keyed by the hash of that code, we gain a perfect incremental compilation cache which is shared among all developers of a project. This is an absolutely WILD feature, but it's fantastic and hard to go back once you've experienced it. I am basically never waiting around for my code to compile - once code has been parsed and typechecked once, by anyone, it's not touched again until it's changed.

Interesting. Whats it like upgrading and managing dependencies in that code? I'd assume it gets more complex when it's not just the Union system but 3rd party plugins (stuff interacting with the OS or other libs).

~90MB+ at this stage and do now allow compression without erroring out. Deploying ala Golang is not feasible at that level but could well be down the line if this dev branch is picked up again!

The exe output grew from from ~50MB to plus ~90MB from 2021 to 2024: https://github.com/denoland/deno/discussions/9811 which mean Deno is worse than Node.js's pkg solution by a decent margin.

Behind the scenes is a simple Sveltekit-powered server function to fetch a Spotify client token then find a user's recommendation playlist and its track information. A Deno edge function to performs this data fetch and renders server-side Svelte.

If your application is written in JavaScript, integrating it with JavaScript extensions is a no-brainer. However, Secutils.dev is entirely written in Rust. How would I even begin? Fortunately, I recently came across an excellent blog post series explaining how to implement your JavaScript runtime in a Rust application with Deno: