wasm-sqlite VS workers-rs

The whole code can be found here: github.com/rkusa/wasm-sqlite/blob/main/wasm/src/vfs.rs. By reducing all down to the two methods get_page and put_page (to which I get back later in the post), the VFS ended up being a generic VFS for when you want to persist SQLite pages as separate files/objects. Using it anywhere else than a DO would just be a matter of providing a different implementation to those two methods.

- 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.