urllib3 VS workerd

As opposed to what the article says, urllib3 now has experimental support for browser as of Jan 30th.

Source: https://github.com/urllib3/urllib3/releases/tag/2.2.0

Then, I tried to get a firm grip on urllib3 base code, contributing this and there until I was ready to kick things up with a proof of concept that would have put urllib3 far ahead. Without any breaking changes. I was delusional. This was a bit of a shock, but six months passed between my initial kick off and my formal give up, and here's why in a nutshell:

Oh wow, thanks for this story! Would love to hear more if you have time :) Good luck with testing it out.

Note that we found an issue w/ emitting an InsecureRequestWarning by default. The request is perfectly secure, it's just we aren't telling the ConnectionPool that information (see: https://github.com/urllib3/urllib3/issues/3331)

I've had a good experience doing a couple of bug fix bounties for urllib3 https://github.com/urllib3/urllib3/issues . I'd be interested in how the maintainers how found running the bug bounty and if it's given them more useful fixes or if it just adds more noise to deal with

ImportError: urllib3 v2.0 only supports OpenSSL 1.1.1+, currently the 'ssl' module is compiled with LibreSSL 2.8.3. See: https://github.com/urllib3/urllib3/issues/2168

> Could not import extension sphinx.builders.linkcheck (exception: urllib3 v2.0 only supports OpenSSL 1.1.1+, currently the 'ssl' module is compiled with OpenSSL 1.0.2n 7 Dec 2017. See: https://github.com/urllib3/urllib3/issues/2168)

This error is coming from Python, it's telling us Python is failing to import the urllib3 library, these lines here are important:

Requests allows you to send HTTP/1.1 requests extremely easily. There’s no need to manually add query strings to your URLs, or to form-encode your POST data. Keep-alive and HTTP connection pooling are 100% automatic, thanks to urllib3.

Judging projects based on stars is really immature. for example everyone knows requests https://github.com/psf/requests the python package that is used in every python project out there. it has 47k star too WOW. but the thing that less people know is urllib3. https://github.com/urllib3/urllib3. it has only 3k stars. It basically does the heavy lifting for requests!!

urllib3 – Python HTTP library with thread-safe connection pooling, file post support, user friendly, and more

Standards bodies only standardize things after they've been proven to work. You can't standardize a new idea before offering it to the market. It's hard enough to get just one vendor to experiment with an idea (it literally took me years to convince everyone inside Cloudflare that we should build Durable Objects). Getting N competing vendors to agree on it -- before anything has been proven in the market -- is simply not possible.

But the Durable Objects API is not complicated and there's nothing stopping competing platforms from building a compatible product if they want. Much of the implementation is open source, even. In fact, if you build an app on DO but decide you don't want to host it on Cloudflare, you can self-host it on workerd:

https://github.com/cloudflare/workerd

In any case, I welcome this initiative with my open hands and look forward all the cool apps that people will now build with this!

[1] https://pyodide.org/

[2] https://github.com/cloudflare/workerd/blob/main/docs/pyodide...

[3] https://github.com/cloudflare/workerd/pull/1875

For ref:

- https://blog.cloudflare.com/workerd-open-source-workers-runt...

- https://github.com/cloudflare/workerd

workerd

I think this is for people who want to run their own cloudflare workers (sort of) and since nobody wants to run full node for that, they want a small runtime that just executes js/wasm in an isolated way. But I wonder why they don't tell me how I can be sure that this is safe or how it's safe. Surely I can't just trust them and it explicitly mentions that it still has file IO so clearly there is still work I need to do customize the isolation further. But then they don't show any info on that core usecase. But then that's probably because they don't really want you to use this to run it on your own, they are selling you on running things on their edge platform called "Wasmer Edge". So that's probably why this is so light on information.. the motivation isn't to get you to use this yourself, just to use this their hosted edge platform. But then I wonder why I wouldn't just use https://github.com/cloudflare/workerd which is also open source. Surely that is fast enough? If not then it should show some benchmarks?

i love how the main reference for workerd can be just one capnp file.

https://github.com/cloudflare/workerd/blob/main/src/workerd/...

this changed my world how i think about computing on the web.

if there was just a good enough js library as for lua and you could directly send capnp messages to workerd instead of always going through files. I guess one day i have to relearn c++ and understand how the internals actually work.

A significant chunk of it is open source: https://github.com/cloudflare/workerd/

Some of the configuration files for applications wind up being an entire language unto themselves, e.g., https://github.com/cloudflare/workerd/blob/1b5057f2bfcfedf146f6f79ff04e99903d55412b/src/workerd/io/compatibility-date.capnp

Edge runtimes are very good alternatives to containers that shouldn't be dismissed for "not being containers". They're often faster, more scalable, and cheaper than containers. Them being so lightweight also enable a "nanoservice architecture" – being able to run every service on a single computer instead of running different services on different computers and having to deal with network latency and unreliability.