blueboat VS workers-sdk

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

Workers

https://github.com/cloudflare/workers-sdk/blob/main/packages...

The Wrangler, Cloudflare's Developer Platform command-line interface (CLI), allows you to manage Worker projects and has an in-built Miniflare, which runs an HTTP server.

/** * Welcome to Cloudflare Workers! This is your first worker. * * - Run `npm run dev` in your terminal to start a development server * - Open a browser tab at http://localhost:8787/ to see your worker in action * - Run `npm run deploy` to publish your worker * * Learn more at https://developers.cloudflare.com/workers/ */ export interface Env { // Example binding to KV. Learn more at https://developers.cloudflare.com/workers/runtime-apis/kv/ // MY_KV_NAMESPACE: KVNamespace; // // Example binding to Durable Object. Learn more at https://developers.cloudflare.com/workers/runtime-apis/durable-objects/ // MY_DURABLE_OBJECT: DurableObjectNamespace; // // Example binding to R2. Learn more at https://developers.cloudflare.com/workers/runtime-apis/r2/ // MY_BUCKET: R2Bucket; // // Example binding to a Service. Learn more at https://developers.cloudflare.com/workers/runtime-apis/service-bindings/ // MY_SERVICE: Fetcher; // // Example binding to a Queue. Learn more at https://developers.cloudflare.com/queues/javascript-apis/ // MY_QUEUE: Queue; } export default { async fetch(request: Request, env: Env, ctx: ExecutionContext): Promise { return new Response('Hello World!'); }, };

$ npm create cloudflare@latest using create-cloudflare version 2.9.0 ╭ Create an application with Cloudflare Step 1 of 3 │ ├ In which directory do you want to create your application? │ dir ./apps/worker │ ├ What type of application do you want to create? │ type "Hello World" Worker │ ├ Do you want to use TypeScript? │ yes typescript │ ├ Copying files from "hello-world" template │ ├ Retrieving current workerd compatibility date │ compatibility date 2023-12-18 │ ╰ Application created ╭ Installing dependencies Step 2 of 3 │ ├ Installing dependencies │ installed via `npm install` │ ├ Installing @cloudflare/workers-types │ installed via npm │ ├ Adding latest types to `tsconfig.json` │ skipped couldn't find latest compatible version of @cloudflare/workers-types │ ╰ Dependencies Installed ╭ Deploy with Cloudflare Step 3 of 3 │ ├ Do you want to deploy your application? │ no deploy via `npm run deploy` │ ├ APPLICATION CREATED Deploy your application with npm run deploy │ │ Navigate to the new directory cd apps/worker │ Run the development server npm run start │ Deploy your application npm run deploy │ Read the documentation https://developers.cloudflare.com/workers │ Stuck? Join us at https://discord.gg/cloudflaredev │ ╰ See you again soon!

Except that there is. Cloudflare is pretty great for free SSL certificates and DNS management, but they also offer a free Workers plan. A Cloudflare worker is basically JavaScript code that runs on Cloudflare's edge network and handles HTTP traffic. You can do a lot with workers, including modifying/rewriting HTML responses. You can probably see where this is going: If a worker can modify HTML responses, then it can inject the umami script into every HTML response.

Cloudflare Workers

And what about the DX of using Workers with Pages?

I tried to use that recently and it was a disaster. I wrote about my experience here:

https://twitter.com/pierbover/status/1641474067013271552

I then opened these two issues:

https://github.com/cloudflare/workers-sdk/issues/2962

https://github.com/cloudflare/workers-sdk/issues/2964

I ended up moving the project over to Netlify + Edge functions. I had it all working in like 5-10 mins as it should. Took me two hours to figure out why Workers weren't working in my Pages project, and could never get Workers working properly with my Astro project.

I think you're working exclusively on the engine of Workers which is really top notch, but Cloudflare really needs to improve the outer layer which affects DX considerably.

If you think this is a bug, please open an issue at: https://github.com/cloudflare/workers-sdk/issues/new/choose ```