firecracker VS book

Hi, I'm the CEO of the company that built this SDK.

We're a company called E2B [0]. We're building and open-source [1] secure environments for running untrusted AI-generated code and AI agents. We call these environments sandboxes and they are built on top of micro VM called Firecracker [2].

You can think of us as giving small cloud computers to LLMs.

We recently created a dedicated SDK for building custom code interpreters in Python or JS/TS. We saw this need after a lot of our users have been adding code execution capabilities to their AI apps with our core SDK [3]. These use cases were often centered around AI data analysis so code interpreter-like behavior made sense

The way our code interpret SDK works is by spawning an E2B sandbox with Jupyter Server. We then communicate with this Jupyter server through Jupyter Kernel messaging protocol [4].

We don't do any wrapping around LLM, any prompting, or any agent-like framework. We leave all of that on users. We're really just a boring code execution layer that sats at the bottom that we're building specifically for the future software that will be building another software. We work with any LLM. Here's how we added code interpreter to Claude [5].

Our long-term plan is to build an automated AWS for AI apps and agents.

Happy to answer any questions and hear feedback!

[0] https://e2b.dev/

[1] https://github.com/e2b-dev

[2] https://github.com/firecracker-microvm/firecracker

[3] https://e2b.dev/docs

[4] https://jupyter-client.readthedocs.io/en/latest/messaging.ht...

[5] https://github.com/e2b-dev/e2b-cookbook/blob/main/examples/c...

As far as I know, Fly uses Firecracker for their VMs. I've been following Firecracker for a while now (even using it in a project), and they don't support GPUs out of the box (and have no plan to support it [1]).

I'm curious to know how Fly figured their own GPU support with Firecracker. In the past they had some very detailed technical posts on how they achieved certain things, so I'm hoping we'll see one on their GPU support in the future!

[1]: https://github.com/firecracker-microvm/firecracker/issues/11...

I pass through a GPU and USB hub to a VM running on a machine in the garage. An optical video cable and network compatible USB extender brings the interface to a different room making it my primary “desktop” computer (and an outdated laptop as a backup device). Doesn’t get more silent and cool than this. Another VM on the garage machine gets a bunch of hard drives passed through to it.

That said, hardware passthrough/VFIO is likely out of the current realistic scope for this project. VM boot times can be optimized if you never look for hardware to initialize in the first place. Though they are still likely initializing a network interface of some sort.

“MicroVM” seems to be a term used when as much as possible is stripped from a VM, such as with https://github.com/firecracker-microvm/firecracker

According to their own FAQ it is indeed: https://github.com/firecracker-microvm/firecracker/blob/main...

What about microVMs like firecracker?

Dynamic memory management - Firecracker's RAM footprint starts low, but once a workload inside allocates RAM, Firecracker will never return it to the host system. After running several workloads inside, you end up with an idling VM that consumes 32 GB of RAM on the host, even though it doesn't need any of it.

Firecracker has a balloon device you can inflate (ie: acquire as much memory inside the VM as possible) and then deflate... returning the memory to the host.

https://github.com/firecracker-microvm/firecracker/blob/main...

Very few things in those companies are being written in Rust, and half of those projects chose Rust around ideological reasons rather than technical, with plenty of 'unsafe' thrown in for performance reasons

https://github.com/firecracker-microvm/firecracker/search?q=...

The fact that 'unsafe' even exists in Rust means it's no better than C with some macros.

Don't get me wrong, Rust has it's place, like all the other languages that came about for various reasons, but it's not going to gain wide adoption.

Future of programming consists of 2 languages - something like C that has a small instruction set for adopting to new hardware, and something that is very high level, higher than Python with LLM in the background. Everything in the middle is fodder.

https://github.com/firecracker-microvm/firecracker is the one that comes to mind, but most of these are internal.

My first port of call was to google learn rust which lead me to "the book". The book is a first steps guide written by the rust community for newbies (or Rustlings as they're called) to gain a 'solid grasp of the language'.

Before Prodzilla, I’d read 'The Book' a couple of times, and had made my way through Rustlings, but hadn’t yet built a serious project in Rust.

To answer your last question;

Start with the Rust book.

https://doc.rust-lang.org/book/

Then do Rustlings until the syntax becomes muscle memory.

Then join the Discord and start doing little projects.

You won’t get up to the proficiency of other languages as quickly in Rust. It takes longer. For me it’s taking a lot longer, but I enjoy it.

Before diving into these repositories, familiarize yourself with Rust and its development ecosystem. The official Rust book is an excellent resource for developers at all levels. Each repository has documentation on how to contribute, covering code style, issue tracking, and pull requests.

This is my third Rust book after the official book and Rust in Action. The other two books are great, but they were too theoretical for me. I'm a slow learner and had much trouble grokking Rust's features and idiosyncrasies. When I was done with these books, I was lost and unsure of what I could do.

It's the same reason everything digital and downloadable isn't free: there's a cost to create it and there's a value to it.

For a language developer to charge for a book about that language, I think that's a completely valid way to make some money off of their work.

Even the Rust book, "The Rust Programming Language" is available freely online [0], but also as a print and ebook for sale via NoStarchPress [1].

[0] https://doc.rust-lang.org/book/

[1] https://nostarch.com/rust-programming-language-2nd-edition

You know you can just read it online right now in 2 different variants It does contain some systems programming.

I am looking at The Book (https://doc.rust-lang.org/book/), but hoped there was an amazing person on youtube.

Yeah, I'll build something, finally trying webassembly.

https://doc.rust-lang.org/book/ https://github.com/rust-lang/rustlings https://doc.rust-lang.org/rust-by-example/