A presentation at JUG Summer Camp in in La Rochelle, France by Horacio Gonzalez
Server-side WebAssembly Speaker: Horacio Gonzalez @LostInBrittany
Horacio Gonzalez @LostInBrittany Spaniard lost in Brittany, developer, dreamer and all-around geek Flutter
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Did I say WebAssembly? Wasm for the friends…
WebAssembly, what’s that?
A low-level binary format Not a programming language A compilation target
That runs on a stack-based virtual machine A portable binary format that runs on all modern browsers… but also on NodeJS and elsewhere!!
With several key advantages
But above all… WebAssembly is not meant to replace JavaScript
Who is using WebAssembly today? And many more others…
A bit of history Remembering the past to better understand the present
Executing other languages in the browser A long story, with many failures…
2012 - From C to JS: enter emscripten Passing by LLVM pivot
Wait, dude! What’s LLVM? A set of compiler and toolchain technologies
2013 - Generated JS is slow… Let’s use only a strict subset of JS: asm.js Only features adapted to AOT optimization
WebAssembly project Joint effort
Hello W(asm)orld My first WebAssembly program
I don’t want to install a compiler now… Let’s use Wasm Explorer https://mbebenita.github.io/WasmExplorer/
Let’s begin with the a simple function WAT: WebAssembly Text Format Human readable version of the .wasm binary
Download the binary .wasm file Now we need to call it from JS…
Instantiating the Wasm 1. Get the .wasm binary file into an array buffer 2. Compile the bytes into a WebAssembly module 3. Instantiate the WebAssembly module
Instantiating the WASM
Loading the squarer function We instantiate the WASM by loading the wrapping JS
Using it! Directly from the browser console (it’s a simple demo…)
Features of Wasm Why is everybody looking at it?
Near native speed https://medium.com/wasmer/benchmarking-webassembly-runtimes-18497ce0d76e
Highly portable It can be run almost everywhere…
Readable and debuggable Each .wasm file with it .wat companion file
Memory safe & secure Running in a fully sandboxed environment
Accepting many source languages And more and more…
Some constraints Still a young platform
Native WASM types are limited WASM currently has four available types: ● ● ● ● i32: 32-bit integer i64: 64-bit integer f32: 32-bit float f64: 64-bit float Types from languages compiled to WASM are mapped to these types
How can we share data? Using the same data in WASM and JS? Shared linear memory between them, and serializing the data to one Wasm types
Solution is coming: Interface types Beautiful description at: https://hacks.mozilla.org/2019/08/webassembly-interface-types
No outside access By design, communication is done using the shared linear memory only
Solution exists: WASI
Mono-thread and scalar operations only Not the most efficient way…
Solution exists: SIMD
Solutions are coming too: Wasm Threads Threads on Web Workers with shared linear memory
Incoming proposals: Garbage collector And exception handling
Server-side WebAssembly Too good to not to use it
Solomon on Web Assembly
Solomon on Web Assembly
A very interesting feature set
The Bytecode Alliance Taking WASM out of the browser
The Bytecode Alliance
Bytecode Alliance projects
Wasmtime
Cranelift
WebAssembly Micro Runtime
Lucet
Other runtimes Runtimes, runtimes everywhere
Wasmer Run any code* on any client… almost * Languages compiling to WASM
Wasmer
Wasmer ecosystem
Wasmer ecosystem
Wasm3
Wasm3
And even Wasm over GraalVM!
Some examples IRL? Like companies using these things
Fastly works on the edge of the cloud
Clever Cloud FaaS infrastructure https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wchehMIsu80
Clever Cloud FaaS Infrastructure Already used in internal projects Able to execute complex loads (neural networks models)
Clever Cloud FaaS Infrastructure Blazing fast
Clever Cloud FaaS Infrastructure Blazing fast
If you follow the trends in web development, you have surely heard of WebAssembly (Wasm). Wasm is supported by all modern browsers, and its growing track of success stories seem to confirm that it will change the web development landscape in the coming years.
But way, this is a DevOps conference, why should you be interested in a web development tool? Because Wasm is not only for web developers, it’s quickly becoming a serious player as a server-side technology.
Wasm is a binary instruction format for a stack-based virtual machine. And Wasm execution environments can include not only browsers but minimal shells, mobiles, desktops and IoT devices.
Tools like Wasmer (a server-side WASM runtime) and WASI (the WebAssembly system interface) allows to run WebAssembly in a fast, scalable, secure way across all machines. It’s potential is so high that Solomon Hykes, co-founder of Docker, has said that if WASM+WASI existed in 2008, they wouldn’t have needed to build Docker.
In this talk we will take a look at the WASM state in 2020, from a server-side point of view. After a brief introduction to WebAssembly, we will see how Wasmer and WASI allow you to use WASM on any machine, and we will discuss real-life exemples of how WebAssembly is a true alternative as a server-side platform.
Some of the use-cases we will see include a FaaS platform, a server-side platform to compute untrusted code, and some other examples of Wasm replacing traditional virtual machines, containers, and processes.
The following resources were mentioned during the presentation or are useful additional information.
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