extism VS edge-runtime

Extism can be really useful for packaging up and running cross-language libraries!

The most clear information about it is at: https://extism.org, but its a bit focused on the primary use case for Extism, being a universal plugin system.

There is a C PDK (https://github.com/extism/c-pdk) which you'd probably want to use in a new wrapper around your library in C++, and compile it to wasm32 freestanding or WASI, but without emscripten. Extism doesn't currently have an interop layer to emscripten.

It may just be my own unique obsession to peek at the internals of .wasm, but if anyone else is curious:

https://modsurfer.dylibso.com/module?hash=ab6f4b2de9db171347...

u/nbittich - curious if you've tried to use your language as as a scripting language inside other apps? I took a peak at your browser wasm environment, and think we could hook up the `compute` entrypoint you have here[0], but I'm not certain what the `ctx` does without going super deep, and if it could be passed into an Extism function[1] (which is how I'd try to run it from within 16+ other languages).

[0]: https://github.com/nbittich/adana/blob/master/adana-script-w...

[1]: https://github.com/extism/extism

Yep, this is one of the initial motivations for creating Extism: https://github.com/extism/extism -- and it works across 16 host languages & 8 guest languages.

On the devx, there's definitely some rough edges around building and using Wasm. My company has been working on a framework to ease integrating Wasm into existing applications. One area it focuses on is providing easy data passing between the host program and the Wasm and vice versa. https://github.com/extism/extism We do not have WASI preview 2 support yet, but are interested in integrating it.

Extism handles this really well across 16 or so different languages - and you don’t need to write a whole IDL / schema.

https://github.com/extism/extism

It’s a general purpose framework for building with WebAssembly and sharing code across languages is a great way to put it to work.

- Functions have a critical bug that prevent us from using in development so we decided to move to our own API servers: https://github.com/supabase/edge-runtime/issues/212

source: https://github.com/supabase/edge-runtime

we needed this to get feature parity across local, the platform, and self-hosting

Refactoring the module loader fixes a few other bugs, such edge functions erroring out when an deno.lock file is already present in the project.

Cold-starts are the time it takes for the “initial load” of an Edge Function. Because the model needs to be downloaded to the Edge Function, could starts can take anywhere from ~2-6s (based on the model). Loading the initial model and building the pipeline usually contributes to it. We are experimenting with the idea of attaching a “read-only disk” of models to our Edge Runtime which mitigate any download penalties. We’ll share more details about these optimizations in a future blog post.

[Supabase engineer & Author of the blog post]

Hi Mark, hosted Supabase Edge Functions would still run on Deno Deploy, so those limitations would still exist. However, we plan to introduce file system access via integration with Supabase Storage. This is still a rough idea stage, maybe we'll have a solid answer in a couple of months :)

For dynamic imports, we haven't looked into it since Supabase users haven't requested it. If you can open an issue on Edge Runtime repo [0] and explain how you intend to use them, we can probably work on a solution.

[0] https://github.com/supabase/edge-runtime/issues