Fastly launches its new compute environment – supports Rust | Hacker News Reader

Fastly launches its new compute environment – supports Rust

fastly.com

127 pointskickdaddy15 comments

Looking at the description, it seems that Fastly supports web assembly and Rust is one of the languages that can compile to web assembly.

However to show my excitement about Rust, I will be appending " - supports Rust" to any announcement I post. For example:

New Linux Kernel released - supports Rust

Dell releases new Developer edition XPS - supports Rust

Intel releases Ice Lake processors - supports Rust

Windows 10 Update - supports Rust

'66 Chevelle Fully Restored - no longer suppports Rust.

Wow it makes me sad that the top comment here is the one that's mocking the post.

Just because they've designed a compute environment that uses WebAssembly doesn't mean that their platform supports all languages that compile to WebAssembly.

That’s not obvious to me... care to elaborate? What languages that target wasm aren’t supported?

Doesn't it? How would they block WA generated from Rust? Or identify it?

If that was the case then arguably they wouldn’t fully support web assembly but only have partial support.

Their speeds look impressive. If it can do cold starts with a response time of <200ms, it might become suitable for a lot of our typical web apps. You can actually try it out at: https://wasm.fastlylabs.com/

Cold start for this product is the same as warm start, as described in the post: 35 microseconds.

Congrats to the Fastly team for achieving this milestone!

It's great to see more companies betting on server-side WebAssembly as an enabler for Edge computing.

This Lucet thing seems pretty awesome. It's apparently an AOT WASM compiler with WASI that runs anywhere. (Disclaimer: Family member works at Fastly but I truly find this impressive.)

Indeed! Lucet is a great piece of engineering.

There are some very popular open-source runtimes that let you run WebAssembly server-side easily: Wasmer (Rust, with three different compilation tiers: Singlepass, Clif and LLVM), WAVM (C++. LLVM), and many more! (disclaimer: I work at Wasmer)

There is some nice blogposts benchmarking them: https://00f.net/2019/10/22/updated-webassembly-benchmark/

It would be nice to see how this compares to Firecracker (https://firecracker-microvm.github.io/) the runtime behind AWS Lambda

one is a webassembly runtime, the other is a program that can help you spin up microvms very quickly. So with firecracker you can spin up ubuntu and fedora images.

This looks awesome, any initial benchmarks against cloudflare workers, lambda, gcf?

In other news, Fastly's new compute environment supports C++, C, COBOL, and Brainf*ck. And, y'know, computes, in any time left over. If you like.

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