workerd VS quickjs

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.

It uses service workers to cache static files, by the time it opens up you already free to be offline, try toggle network switch to verify.

It has download link at bottom of the about page ([accdoo.app/about]) which you could then self host it by dropping into any static hosting services.

btw, the Pi feature was by-product from the original App but I won't expand here, if you'd like to learn more, please checkout its two Show HN post (39115559 and 39138957) previously.

[wiki]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chudnovsky_algorithm

[quickjs/pi]: https://bellard.org/quickjs/pi.html

[pi_bigint.js]: https://github.com/bellard/quickjs/blob/master/examples/pi_b...

[accdoo.app/about]: https://accdoo.app/about#releases

[39115559]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39115559

[39138957]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39138957

Just go with quickjs, I think this is what you are looking for.

https://bellard.org/quickjs/

QuickJS

I think QuickJS, written in C, is a user-"friendly" starting point for implementing ECMA-262. Documentation QuickJS Javascript Engine.

There is a readme on the project's main page: https://bellard.org/quickjs/

The newsworthy bit here is that the activity seemed to have stalled for year or two and now Fabrice pushed a few fixes and made a new release.

Just to demonstrate GitHub repositories do not necessarily reflect upon a programmers' body of work, Fabrice Bellard has one (1) repository published on GitHub, quickjs. Compare the list of work on Bellard's home page https://bellard.org/.

> I am still confused, it's a JavaScript runtime intended to be deployed to JavaScript/Wasm runtimes?

Seemingly.

> Why does a JavaScript runtime need a JavaScript runtime?

Because if you want to create a Service Worker server for CloudFlare Workers and other JavaScript/Wasm runtimes, that's the only option for doing that AFAIK.

FWIW, this isn't a new idea. For example, Figma uses QuickJS (https://bellard.org/quickjs/) for their plug-in runtime: https://www.figma.com/blog/an-update-on-plugin-security/