postgres-wasm VS container2wasm

Also: https://github.com/copy/v86 - more productized browser x86 runtime, used by eg https://github.com/snaplet/postgres-wasm

> forcing SQLite

It might be the case that it's running SQLite via wasm. If so, then other database engines would need to be runnable in a browser too.

PostgreSQL has been shown to work in the browser (eg https://www.crunchydata.com/blog/learn-postgres-at-the-playg..., and also https://github.com/snaplet/postgres-wasm), so that might be an option.

Not sure about others.

Thanks, I've been looking at WASM, for ex https://github.com/snaplet/postgres-wasm/tree/main/packages/... , it would certainly simplify everything to "download a fat file".

Hey! Peter from Snaplet here. This is really exciting stuff. We created the OSS postgres-wasm (https://github.com/snaplet/postgres-wasm) example a few weeks ago. An idea I'm playing around with is something like:

  1. Visit https://postgresql.com/try?version=14.x

Other in-memory alternatives for PostgreSQL embedded-postgres (I haven't tried it yet) postgres-wasm (currently it only runs in the browser).

"/s" is obsolete as of now: https://github.com/snaplet/postgres-wasm I'm so sorry

Today we're open sourcing postgres-wasm with our friends at Snaplet.

Peter from Snaplet here. A month ago I saw the CrunchyData post and wanted to play around with the code that made it happen, it wasn't OSS so I asked for help:

> If anyone out there wants to work on an open source version of this full-time please reach out to me. [0]

Paul reached out and we started working on it almost immediately. Check out the repo here: https://github.com/snaplet/postgres-wasm

We have a blog post about some of the interesting technical challenges that we faced whilst building this: https://www.snaplet.dev/post/postgresql-in-the-browser

Like most things, this is built on-top of the amazing open-source projects that made this possible, but special mention goes to v86.js and buildroot. We just glued it together.

---

[0] Request for collaboration: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32500526

The existence of vscode.dev always makes me wonder why Microsoft never released an iOS version of VSCode to get more users into its ecosystem. Sure, it's almost as locked down as the web environment, but there's a lot of space in that "almost" - you could do all sorts of things like let users run their code, or complex extensions, in containers in a web view using https://github.com/ktock/container2wasm or similar.

Unfortunately cosmopolitan wouldn't work for dockerc. Cosmopolitan works as long as you only use it but container runtimes require additional features. Also containers contain arbitrary executables so not sure how that would work either...

As for WASM, this is already possible using container2wasm[0] and wasmer[1]'s ability to generate static binaries.

[0]: https://github.com/ktock/container2wasm

[1]: https://wasmer.io/

Really impressed by the depth and breadth of this project, well done!

A particularly interesting part is the socket layer inside the browser. Other people solving this problem have previously used a proxy to a server that does the real socket implementation. This means you can't have a "browser-only" solution.

The author has solved this (for HTTP/S only) by proxying HTTP requests and then re-creating them as fetch requests (details here: https://github.com/ktock/container2wasm/tree/main/examples/n...). I'm very interested in using this approach for my own project Runno (https://runno.dev).