firecracker VS tauri

This architecture leverages microVMs for rapid scaling and high-density workloads. But does it work for GPU? The answer is no. You can look at the old 2019 GitHub issue and the comments to it to get the bigger picture of why it is so.

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.

Hi, dear Tauri! Long time no see. I published my first post, Developing a Desktop Application via Rust and NextJS. The Tauri Way almost a year ago. Since then, Tauri has become stronger. I'm happy about that! And now, I am very pleased to make a useful contribution to the Tauri community. As a full-stack developer, I frequently face situations where I need to start a DB-based UI project as fast as possible. It's stressful if I need to start the project from 100% scratch. I prefer to keep some boilerplates on hand, which will save me time and nerves and will be the subject of this article.

Hey Thanks!

Just electron & vite. I might actually migrate off electron, Tauri (https://tauri.app/) seems to be getting more stable and it's gotten great reviews.

I think this is the boilerplate I used though https://github.com/cawa-93/vite-electron-builder.

Well the great thing about WebAssembly is that you can port QT or anything else to be at a layer below -- thanks to WebAssembly Interface Types[0] and the Component Model specification that works underneath that.

To over-simplify, the Component Model manages language interop, and WIT constrains the boundaries with interfaces.

IMO the problem here is defining a 90% solution for most window, tab, button, etc management, then building embeddings in QT, Flutter/Skia, and other lower level engines. Getting a good cross-platform way of doing data passing, triggering re-renders, serializing window state is probably the meat of the interesting work.

On top of that, you really need great UX. This is normally where projects fall short -- why should I use this solution instead of something like Tauri[2] which is excellent or Electron?

[0]: https://github.com/WebAssembly/component-model/blob/main/des...

[1]: https://github.com/WebAssembly/component-model/blob/main/des...

[2]: https://tauri.app/

Welcome to the 2nd episode of our series “Building with Tauri”, where we chat with developers who build amazing projects and products using Tauri.

Tauri seemed like the "thing" I should switch to because everybody loves Rust (heh), and because it ships significantly smaller apps.

First of all, I will be using npm as my package manager but feel free to use whatever you prefer. Find more info here.

Today I'm talking about Tauri! Do you know all the various tools that allow you to develop native applications starting from web languages? They often need an intermediate compilation, in the middle of which you end up encountering various problems not always transparent and directly solvable with a language mostly detached from native development. On the other hand, there's still the ease of developing attractive and easily usable interfaces, which are more difficult to develop with low level languages.