tokera
I did
> But Wasmer Edge does not run close to most customers and does not run on their browser.
It does run in the browser, that is what https://wasmer.sh uses to launch things published via the `wasmer publish` command. There are more plans to integrate these closer together into a hybrid system in the future with converged networking and transparent offloading work to servers, needs more work but its for sure possible with this foundation.
> I think Edge is something where a limited pilot makes no sense.
One does not just hit a button and servers appear everywhere in the world at once for free, all CDN's do the same thing, they run in racks of servwrs and expand their POP's based off real data and not just guess work. For instance, apparently Japan has a massive interest in WASIX, so perhaps the next POP should go there. Its also worth mentioning that if Wasmer Edge had been built on top of someone elses Edge (as others have done) then they would never be able to offer the cheap pricing.
> I think Edge is something where a limited pilot makes no sense.
It is a good point you make here about perception versus alpha relaity but with the architecture of the design and the huge amount of interest coming from the community the locations will expand quickly so it will be a growing pain of history fairly quickly.
> I don't see how wasm will significantly help you get more servers closer to users than existing companies in this space
No other company I am aware of are trying to build a distributed computer that lets developers write a program that runs in a hybrid setup of running in the literal browser of the user and connected to high performance compute in data centres. Honestly this is the bit that really excites me, imagine a program that runs in the browser but has real threads that also run in a data center. Exciting times.
In traditional Cloud Computing the customer must "select" where it runs (i.e. pick a data centre or region) - for instance, when you go in the Azure portal for many services like AKS you must select where it is hosted. In Edge computing you don't need to do this as it automatically serves the request at the closest "pop" (point of presence), this is also how Wasmer Edge works.
Wasmer Edge are in an alpha release phase thus the edge network is kept purposely limited in this early pilot to take a careful approach to its expansion.
Wasmer also have plans to build a hybrid environment between the browser itself and the edge network which will unlock some really exciting use cases thanks to WASIX.
Ignore the troll reply... he is paid (or just sells himself for free) by the competition to discredit... just downvote him.
https://github.com/john-sharratt/wasix-witx/commit/3b1469687...
now I know its hard to imagine someone other than your personal boogeyman contributing value to the open source world, but there is a real need for me to keep my coding skills up to scratch and it just so happens that `wasmer.io` are the coolest kids in WASM town right now, so I'll share my spare time with them thanks.
* WASIX does not allow one to open a random file in the host environment, in fact WASIX changed absolutely nothing in file system ABI's at all from preview1 - it just added other extensions.
* WASIX has not removed the capabilities model and instead extended it to support Berkley sockets - i.e. there are capabilities defined for the new operations.
* WASIX is fully sandboxed, meaning the network is completely virtual and can be restricted as much as one likes
* TTY and forking is also fully sandboxed.
* You can't reject the Internet
what you must realize is that one does not have to use a syscall if they don't like it in (e.g. just use rust to code your app and it will never call the fork syscall)... but taking that choice away from others who want to use it is unfair as its denying them access to the WASM ecosystem (e.g. bash)
- full Berkley socket support - sub-process spawning, waiting - forking - TTY support - pipes - event streams - DNS resolving - longjmp/setjmp
without these we can't compile our favorite apps in our favorite languages
please let us all know when these above missing capabilities will be delivered in preview2? will that also be in June?
honestly - we are better together - so we should find a way of bringing these dreams together going forward.
lets reflect on this - if this was done as pull requests to `preview1` then would they have been accepted?... of course not, likely with dismissive rejection comments around even the idea of suggesting some of these POSIX compatible syscalls.
WASIX should be seen as a preview1.5 rather than something new, just extensions to WASI that add the missing bits that are badly needed today to actual compile useful apps from various code bases.
at a minimum this is an interim solution so that app developers can just start compiling their code bases into WASM and we can all get moving forward together - no one wants a fork here.
of course the WASI maintainers (who have made comments in this thread) are reading all this and hopefully this will be a wake up call to add these missing syscalls as a priority also into preview2 so everyone benefits - only then WASIX can die and its purpose is served... but until then WASIX will get long term support so the community can proceed literally today onwards.