wasi-libc VS workers-rs

Now there are projects like WASI that allows for interfacing with system resources for WASM code this allows for devs to target WASM runtime for their apps sliding the apps to run locally on any OS without any porting required. This could be a game changer in the future like Docker and containers was in the past decade.

So it doesn’t seem like there has been progress on a pseudo-random number generator function for typst, but there are multiple other ways to solve this: 1. Just don’t. Typst has this functional philosophy, there one input always produces the same output. (not an answer to your question tho) 2. Interface with a webassembly module which has a random number generator. So you could e.g. compile c to wasm and statically link a libc version. You would then just have to export the rand() function. (You could use any lang for this, which has a stdlib with a pseudo random number generator) 3. Implement your own. Random number generators are actually not that hard something like an LCG isn’t to complex. (Id provide an example but im on my phone rn)

Actually WASI[0] will be a better alternative, IIRC extism serialize and deserialize the data that you want to pass every time, adding a lot of overhead.

[0] https://wasi.dev

Actually, it was in wasi-libc: https://github.com/WebAssembly/wasi-libc/blob/main/libc-bott...

Proper isolation in C# is only now becoming a thing, with .Net support for WASI, which is essentially a WebAssembly sandbox which can be given extremely granular privileges (such as access to spefic file system directories, or an effective virtual file system). As an upside, the idea is that it should be possible to write the WASI packages in more or less anything.

Wasm Labs dev here :)

In mod_wasm, there are some differences with a pure CGI implementation. When Apache boots, it loads the configuration and initializes the WasmVM. When a new HTTP request arrives, the VM is ready so you don't need to initialize a different process to manage it.

You still need to process the request and pass the data to the Wasm module. This step is done via STDIN through the WebAssembly System Interface (WASI) implementation [0]. The same happens in the opposite direction, as the module returns the data via STDOUT.

So, the CGI pattern is still there, but it doesn't require new processes and all the code runs in a sandbox.

However this is not the only way you can run a Wasm module. In this specific case, we use CGI via WASI. In other cases, you may compile a module to fulfill a specific API, like ProxyWasm [1] to create HTTP filters for proxies like Envoy.

- [0] https://wasi.dev/

- [1] https://github.com/proxy-wasm/spec

Never done that, but I think you need this: https://wasi.dev/

The Python builds from the WebAssembly language runtimes [0] project target the WebAssembly System Interfaces (WASI) [1]. It allows the Python interpreter to interact with resources like the filesystem.

Many server-side Wasm runtimes supports WASI out of the box. For the browser, you need to provide a polyfill to emulate these resources like the one provided by the WASI team [2].

Regarding SQLite, these builds include libsqlite so you should be able to use it :)

- [0] https://github.com/vmware-labs/webassembly-language-runtimes

- [1] https://wasi.dev/

- [2] https://wasi.dev/polyfill/

Effective debugging results in effective programming; itk-wasm makes effective debugging of WebAssembly possible. In this tutorial, adapted from the itk-wasm documentation, we walk through how to debug a C++ data processing pipeline with the mature, native binary debugging tools that are comfortable for developers. This is a fully featured way to ensure the base correctness of a processing pipeline. Next, we will walk through an interactive debugging experience for WASI WebAssembly. With itk-wasm, we can debug the same source code in either context with an interactive debugger. We also have a convenvient way to pass data from our local filesystem into a WebAssembly (Wasm) processing pipeline.

Communication between the WASM module and the rest of the application needs to be done in very simple types (bytes, ints and floats). No complex types are supported yet. This is why most WASM compilers also provide some glue-code to map between complex types like strings or arrays. The Web Assembly System Interface (WAS) is an on-progress standard aimed to solve this last limitation; once it's mature it will allow easy interoperation with almost every environment. WASI is already available in some WSAM compilers and runtimes.

- The speed of the Python interpreter running in WebAssembly

Today, Python cold starts are slower than cold starts for a JavaScript Worker of equivalent size. A basic "Hello World" Worker written in JavaScript has a near zero cold start time, while a Python Worker has a cold start under 1 second.

That's because we still need to load Pyodide into your Worker on-demand when a request comes in. The blog post describes what we're working on to reduce this — making Pyodide already available upfront.

Once a Python Worker has gone through a cold start though, the differences are more on the margins — maybe a handful milliseconds, depending on what happens during the request.

- There is a slight cost (think — microseconds not milliseconds) to crossing the "bridge" between JavaScript and WebAssembly — for example, by performing I/O or async operations. This difference tends to be minimal — generally something measured in microseconds not milliseconds. People with performance sensitive Workers already write them in Rust https://github.com/cloudflare/workers-rs, which also relies on bridging between JavaScript and WebAssembly.

- The Python interpreter that Pyodide provides, that runs in WebAssembly, isn't as fast as the years and years of optimization that have gone into making JavaScript fast in V8. But it's still relatively early days for Pyodide, compared to the JS engine in V8 — there are parts of its code where we think there are big perf gains to be had. We're looking forward to upstreaming performance improvements, and there are WebAssembly proposals that help here too.

Not yet, but we're working on that https://github.com/cloudflare/workers-rs/pull/324

I'm also in the Workers org but I have had a bit of interaction with Rust. There's some Rust in the Workers runtime using lol-html for HTMLRewriter as well as some tooling and there's the full blown workers-rs framework that I work on, but that's about it for the Rust I work on regularly.

I'm an engineer at Cloudflare working on Workers (and a maintainer of workers-rs) and I'd love to help whoever ends up maintaining this get that PR rewriting it in Rust across the line.

GitHub - cloudflare/workers-rs: Write Cloudflare Workers in 100% Rust via WebAssembly

I never said it was, but thankfully nowadays there are plenty of other tools that are fast enough to keep the dev cycle quick. Personally esbuild is my go-to when I need a bundler but I've grown really fond of SWC native api, we used to use it at work for our wasm build tool for our workers-rs framework.

There's actually a rust framework for Workers https://github.com/cloudflare/workers-rs

I'm a maintainer of the of the Cloudflare workers-rs project to allow you to write serverless functions in Rust running as WASM in our V8-based runtime. There's certainly some rough spots (doesn't have complete parity with our default JS runtime apis), but if you're concerned with cold start times and you don't need a full containerized environment I think it's a solid choice.

Most likely, it should, we just haven't had the time to fully implement it or add a library to wrap the FFI. Please let us know you need a feature by opening an issue.

I may be biased, as the original project author, but I’d recommend using Cloudflare Workers https://github.com/cloudflare/workers-rs - totally free their with very generous limits.