wazero VS starlark-go

https://github.com/tetratelabs/wazero/releases/tag/v1.7.0

This includes the final release of the new optimizing compiler, which is a big improvement over the previous one.

The new version also adds experimental support for threads and snapshot/restore (setjmp/longjmp).

This is already being used by go-pgquery, all will mean that sqlc won't need to ship to almost copies of wazero (these features had been implemented on a friendly fork, and have now been up-streamed).

> Go actually has one of the best WASM runtimes https://github.com/tetratelabs/wazero

Wazero looks super cool. I saw somewhere that programs can be run with a timeout, which sounds great for sandboxing. The program input is just a slice of bytes [1], so an interesting use case would be to use something like Nats [2] to distribute programs to different servers. Super simple distributed computing!

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1: https://github.com/tetratelabs/wazero/blob/main/examples/bas...

2: https://natsbyexample.com/examples/messaging/pub-sub/go

It is slower.

The WASM runtime wazero [1] uses a compiler on amd64 and arm64 (on Linux, macOS, Windows, and FreeBSD), but the current compiler is very fast (at compiling), but very naive (generates less than optimal code).

An optimizing compiler is currently being developed, and should be released in the coming months. I'm optimistic that this compiler will cover the performance gap between WASM and modernc.

[1]: https://wazero.io

I am a fan of the Jacobin project! For your uses, you may also want to consider wazero [1], a pure-go WebAssembly runtime. Full disclosure: I am on the team :)

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

No longer does Wasm/WASI need JS host! There are many spec-compliant runtimes built for environments from tiny embedded systems up to beefy arm/x86 racks:

- https://github.com/bytecodealliance/wasm-micro-runtime

- https://github.com/bytecodealliance/wasmtime

- https://github.com/wasmerio/wasmer

- https://github.com/tetratelabs/wazero

- https://github.com/extism/extism (disclaimer, my company's project - makes wasm easily embeddable into 16+ programming languages!)

full disclosure: I don't work on it, but the devs are committers/contributors to https://wazero.io (I am a wazero committer) :)

Starlark in go https://github.com/google/starlark-go is a great way to combine the best of both, the ease of use of Python and the simplicity of go.

I have been building a platform for deploying internal web applications using this approach https://github.com/claceio/clace. Use Starlark to configure the application, the platform itself is built in go.

The big unknown is your task definition: what does user-defined logic look like? If you're expecting go code, that's gonna need some cleverness because of the compiled nature of it. There's a node runtime implemented in go if you want to provide sandboxed javascript (check the source of k6.io, it's the main one I know that uses it). If you want to provide building blocks and let them compose them, starlark might be a good choice.

Another one of those (with broader language support) is the Starlark language, which has a Go implementation: https://github.com/google/starlark-go

Every config format gets as complex to be touring complete in the end. We had similar problems and eventually got rid of that complexity and switched to starlark (the bazel config language), was a huge benefit for the tools. https://github.com/google/starlark-go "Starlark is a dialect of Python intended for use as a configuration language. Like Python, it is an untyped dynamic language with high-level data types, first-class functions with lexical scope, and garbage collection."

Direct link to the Go implementation of Starlark: https://github.com/google/starlark-go

For a Python-like syntax, https://github.com/google/starlark-go is the language used in Babel. It's very mature, but since it is used in a massive mature project with a specific purpose, it doesn't move fast or drift from the spec of its Java-based sibling. It doesn't have exception try except blocks or some other features you might expect, but for short extension logic, it might be exactly what you want with the stability you can depend upon.

Context: https://github.com/google/starlark-go/blob/cfacd890221418a2dc2c736f7b5e3476c38709b1/starlark/int_posix64.go

Thus envd is more like Dockerfile, while it uses a simplified python dialect starlark https://github.com/google/starlark-go as the build language.

Use Go (mostly for starlark-go)