blueboat VS jose

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....

Blueboat may be what you’re looking for

https://github.com/losfair/blueboat

> 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

https://github.com/losfair/rusty-workers

They're not perfectly isolated to a high security standard such that you could deploy your own v8 workers SaaS. And they do have quirks and development woes. I haven't tested in production but if it's just your trusted apps wanting to exceed the cloudflare workers 30 scripts limit then both are wonderfully powerful solutions to put behind a https proxy.

I used standard Web APIs such as fetch() and WebCrypto. The most common thing I had to do was JWT token generation/validation. I worked with the jose library (the only dependency in the project) because it is cross-platform and also works with the WebCrypto API.

Biggest sharp edge I've encountered is the very much WIP WebCrypto API support. In practical terms, this means things like signing/verifying JWTs is not very well supported: https://github.com/panva/jose/discussions/243

That said, the situation is improving rapidly, and I've been personally willing to bet that the support will be solid by the time I finish prototyping and need to start adding auth to my latest project.