from Hacker News

Wasmer 5.0

by syrusakbary on 10/29/24, 11:02 PM with 82 comments

  • by skybrian on 10/30/24, 5:10 AM

    These performance graphs are confusing and possibly cursed. Sometimes they're log scale (confusing enough) and others, I have no idea what they're trying to say.

    For example, the first graph, labelled "Argon 2", nearly all the bars are the same length, labelled "100" (no units given, apparently log scale) and the individual bars are labelled with entirely different numbers in ms (presumably milliseconds).

  • by ledgerdev on 10/29/24, 11:36 PM

    > having V8 as a backend also means supporting WebAssembly Exceptions and Garbage Collection under the hood. Stay tuned for more news on this front soon

    Looking forward to this and languages that can make use of wasm-gc.

    Does wasm-gc allow sharing of host data/strings across different modules in the same runtime, or is it contained to only single module with repeated calls/invocations? The scenario I am considering would invoke several different modules in a pipeline, pass data between each step in an efficient manner.

  • by thiht on 10/30/24, 7:41 AM

    I have a hard time understanding what Wasmer does from their landing page. I understand it runs everything everywhere, unbound and above the cloud, but what does it do? From the name it seems like a very dev oriented product, and I can’t find a single technical word, just buzzwords
  • by MuffinFlavored on 10/29/24, 11:27 PM

    Cool release!

    I've yet to personally find a good use case for wasm in any project, kind of the same way I'm not quite sure what to do with a bunch of Raspberry Pis

    It fills a need, I just don't know who/what has that need.

    Example: Say I write a bunch of Rust async projects for fun. Scraping APIs, etc.

    How/why would I choose wasm/wasmer to do that instead? I'd do it in Rust (awkwardly/in some specific non-standard way) to compile to wasm to then run in wasmer? To what benefit? Ok, that's not a good usecase/example

    So what is?...

  • by OtomotO on 10/30/24, 12:26 AM

    Interesting.

    I am happy with wasmtime though.

    Hacking on a wasm component model and wasi based plugin system these days.

    Having loads of fun. (I am aware of extism, but I am doing it for the fun :))

  • by DustinBrett on 10/30/24, 12:51 AM

    I wish they had a solution that didn't require Cross-Origin Isolated headers. I am still using an older version where that wasn't required.
  • by enugu on 10/30/24, 2:40 AM

    Could this ever function as a less resource intensive substitute for Electron apps? WASM doesn't have DOM access, but could it be added in these extensions?

    Edit: Maybe this question doesn't make sense as the OS would need to have the runtime installed, and if that can be assumed, we would have lightweight apps already.

  • by 0points on 10/30/24, 9:44 AM

    I'm having a really hard time reading the performance graps.

    The thousand separator comma and dot are both used (which is not correct in any part of the world), and precision is being randomly rounded to 1, 2 or 3 digits.

  • by punkpeye on 10/30/24, 12:31 AM

    Would this allow to safely eval Node.js code in a sandbox?
  • by mike_r_parsons on 10/30/24, 8:37 AM

    I really don't know what problem(s) this solves. Don't all the javascript runtimes already have wasm engines built into the runtimes?
  • by v3ss0n on 10/30/24, 10:54 AM

    Ok where to use it? Anybody using it? How it gives benefit over docker?
  • by int_19h on 10/30/24, 12:36 AM

    Is Wasmer still openly adversarial wrt the Bytecode Alliance?
  • by wg0 on 10/30/24, 12:43 AM

    Sorry to be that guy but what's the business model for all these web assembly runtime companies?
  • by thrdbndndn on 10/30/24, 1:59 AM

    God, please stop using random AI-generated images in a release post..