workers-wasi
design
workers-wasi | design | |
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5 | 34 | |
119 | 11,350 | |
0.0% | 0.2% | |
0.0 | 3.9 | |
about 1 year ago | 11 days ago | |
C++ | ||
BSD 3-clause "New" or "Revised" License | Apache License 2.0 |
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workers-wasi
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WASM by Example
The examples seemed clear enough to read (I did not test them), but I felt than even when teaching by example there needs to be more overview and explanation. I.e., I would prefer an overview of WASM structure and use with examples, rather than just the examples. (I have some (but limited) experience using WASM.)
As for the utility of wasm, note also that Cloudflare workers can run WASM on edge servers [1], and that the Swift community has some support for compiling to wasm [2].
I've never really understood how wasm could do better than java bytecode, but I've been impressed with how much people are using lua and BPF. More generally, in a world of federated programming, we need languages client can submit that providers can run safely, without obviously leaking any secret sauce -- perhaps e.g., for model refinement or augmented lookup.
[1] https://github.com/cloudflare/workers-wasi
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SQLite builds for WASI since 3.41.0
Those are great questions! I believe Emscripten will be required for some cases as it provides more features for targeting a Web Browser. If WASI is the only requirement for a Wasm module, then there are three possible solutions:
- Use a library that provides the WASI bindings in a browser environments: there are some OSS projects that provides WASI bindings on top of browser technologies. For example, workers-wasi from Cloudflare [1]. It could be even another Wasm module that provides the implementation for the main one. I know the people from Loophole Labs are experimenting with virtual filesystems (VFS) [2].
- Browsers provides a WASI implementation: server-oriented runtimes like NodeJS are already providing these bindings (under a experimental flag). I shouldn't have stated that as a fact, as browsers may provide it or not. However, I saw in the past the Google Chrome team experimenting with WASI and the browser FileSystem API [3]. So, I think it may happen :)
- [1] https://github.com/cloudflare/workers-wasi
- [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=46jZSXVxYPw
- [3] https://github.com/GoogleChromeLabs/wasi-fs-access
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The Tug-of-War over Server-Side WebAssembly
Indeed, some people are doing this:
- WASI once had an official polyfill https://wasi.dev/polyfill/, now apparently succeeded by https://github.com/bjorn3/browser_wasi_shim
- wasmer-js provides a JS polyfill for WASI https://docs.wasmer.io/integrations/js/wasi
- Cloudflare has a WIP polyfill https://github.com/cloudflare/workers-wasi
I'm generally leery of non-temporary polyfills, so I'm not sure that any of these feel like a long-term viable option for me.
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Rust advocacy at a medium-sized startup
I think modern C++ could be perfectly viable as well. Maybe https://github.com/cloudflare/workers-wasi would be a good starting point? I'm not too knowledgeable on the subject. Exciting times though, I think WASM might be the great equalizer.
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Store SQLite in Cloudflare Durable Objects
While there is a WASI implementation for Workers: cloudflare/workers-wasi, I prefer to implement each import manually - especially when there are so few and especially while I am still experimenting. This helps me to keep the full picture of what's going on.
design
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Rust, WASM, and LOK
First of all, a quick rundown of what WASM is. It stands for Web Assembly. In essence, similar to how Java compiles down to a bytecode that is interpreted by a Java Virtual Machine, Web Assembly is a different bytecode interpreted by the browser. Many different languages can compile into WASM, and Javascript can interface with it like a module. In my case, I wrote a lot of the source code in Rust and compiled it down to a WASM module, then called into it from Javascript.
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Surprisingly Powerful – Serverless WASM with Rust Article 1
WebAssembly (abbreviated Wasm) is a binary instruction format for a stack-based virtual machine. Wasm is designed as a portable compilation target for programming languages, enabling deployment on the web for client and server applications. - https://webassembly.org
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Reaching and surpassing the limits of JavaScript BigData with WebAssembly
With WebAssembly we can compile our C++ codebase into a wasm module for the browser. So when you look at a SciChart.js chart you're actually seeing our C++ graphics engine wrapped for JavaScript.
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WASM Instructions
I should add, however, that the unmentioned elephant in the room is V8 JIT (TurboFan), which simply doesn't handle irreducible control flow. While there are some valid theoretical arguments around the current arrangement in Wasm, looking at the history of the associated discussions makes it pretty obvious that having V8 support Wasm and generate fast code similar to what it can do for asm.js was an overriding concern in many cases. And Google straight up said that if Wasm has ICF, they will not bother supporting such cases, so it will be done by a much slower fallback:
https://github.com/WebAssembly/design/issues/796#issuecommen...
AFAIK no other Wasm implementation has the same constraint - the rest generally tend to desugar everything to jumps and then proceed from there. So this is, at least to some extent, yet another case of a large company effectively forcing an open standard to be more convenient for them specifically.
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Supercharge Web AI Model Testing: WebGPU, WebGL, and Headless Chrome
https://github.com/WebAssembly/design/issues/1397
> Currently allocating more than ~300MB of memory is not reliable on Chrome on Android without resorting to Chrome-specific workarounds, nor in Safari on iOS.
That's about allocating CPU memory but the GPU memory situation is similar.
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Build your own WebAssembly Compiler
As far as I can tell (5 minutes of internet research) this was to allow easier compilation to JavaScript as a fallback in the days when WASM wasn't widely supported.
"Please add goto" issue has been open since 2016:
https://github.com/WebAssembly/design/issues/796
Most interesting comment:
> The upcoming Go 1.11 release will have experimental support for WebAssembly. This will include full support for all of Go's features, including goroutines, channels, etc. However, the performance of the generated WebAssembly is currently not that good.
> This is mainly because of the missing goto instruction. Without the goto instruction we had to resort to using a toplevel loop and jump table in every function. Using the relooper algorithm is not an option for us, because when switching between goroutines we need to be able to resume execution at different points of a function. The relooper can not help with this, only a goto instruction can.
> It is awesome that WebAssembly got to the point where it can support a language like Go. But to be truly the assembly of the web, WebAssembly should be equally powerful as other assembly languages. Go has an advanced compiler which is able to emit very efficient assembly for a number of other platforms. This is why I would like to argue that it is mainly a limitation of WebAssembly and not of the Go compiler that it is not possible to also use this compiler to emit efficient assembly for the web.
^ https://github.com/WebAssembly/design/issues/796#issuecommen...
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Flawless – Durable execution engine for Rust
When I implemented a WASM compiler, the only source of float-based non-determinism I found was in the exact byte representation of NaN. Floating point math is deterministic. See https://webassembly.org/docs/faq/#why-is-there-no-fast-math-... and https://github.com/WebAssembly/design/blob/main/Nondetermini....
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Requiem for a Stringref
> To work with GC, you need some way to track if the GC'd object is accessible in WASM itself.
I've never heard of a GC with that kind of API. Usually any native code that holds a GC reference would either mark that reference as a root explicitly (eg. https://github.com/WebAssembly/design/issues/1459) or ensure that it can be traced from a parent object. Either way, this should prevent collection of the object. I agree that explicitly checking whether a GC'd object has been freed would not make any sense.
> The reason why you probably need a custom string type is so you can actually embed string literals without relying on interop with the environment.
WASM already has ways of embedding flat string data. This can be materialized into GC/heap objects at module startup. This must happen in some form anyway, as all GC-able objects must be registered with the GC upon creation, for them to be discoverable as candidates for collection.
Overall I still don't understand the issue. There is so much prior art for these patterns in native extensions for Python, PHP, Ruby, etc.
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The Tug-of-War over Server-Side WebAssembly
Giving you a buffer that grows is the allocation approach I am talking about. This is not how your OS works. Your OS itself works with an allocator that does a pretty good job making sure that your memory ends up not fragmented. Because WASM is in between, the OS is not in control of the memory, and instead the browser is. The browser implementation of "bring your own allocator" is cute but realistically just a waste of time for everybody who wants to deploy a wasm app because whatever allocator you bring is crippled by the overarching allocator of the browser messing everything up.
It seems like the vendors are recognizing this though, with firefox now having a discard function aparently!
https://github.com/WebAssembly/design/issues/1397
- How do Rust WebAssembly apps free unused memory?
What are some alternatives?
workers-rs - Write Cloudflare Workers in 100% Rust via WebAssembly
content - The content behind MDN Web Docs
asyncify - Standalone Asyncify helper for Binaryen
wave - Realtime Web Apps and Dashboards for Python and R
wasm-sqlite - [Experimental] SQLite compiled to WASM with pluggable page storage.
interface-types
binaryen - Optimizer and compiler/toolchain library for WebAssembly
Chevrotain - Parser Building Toolkit for JavaScript
do-sqlite - [Experimental] Persist SQLite in a Cloudflare Durable Object
WASI - WebAssembly System Interface
wasi-libc - WASI libc implementation for WebAssembly
iswasmfast - Performance comparison of WebAssembly, C++ Addon, and native implementations of various algorithms in Node.js.