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Comment by lewisjoe | Hacker News Reader

This looks promising. I'm amazed at the kinds of places WebAssembly has found its way into.

I myself am working on putting WebAssembly as a UI reconciliation engine.

1. You write your UI component spec (similar to React) in a language of your choice.

2. This compiles down to a WASM module, that knows how your state interplays with your UI tree.

3. A platform specific embedder can then write a tiny layer of renderer that translates commands from the WebAssmelby VM into native UI updates.

This way we can liberate UI programming from being too close to a platform and possibly could run on servers (damn fast SSR)

I'm attempting a proof of concept and I've logged my thoughts as I'm working through the project - https://github.com/joelewis/kwasm/blob/master/notes.txt

Github renders text files without line wrappings, so here's the raw link: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/joelewis/kwasm/master/note...

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Hi! (one of the authors of Spin here.)

As you can assume, we are just as excited about all the places where we can run WebAssembly! That's a pretty intriguing idea, looking forward to seeing it evolve!

Thanks, and I'm really rooting for Spin's success. The cloud computing costs have reached ridiculous levels recently. I blame the new age DevOps culture trained to hit every nail with Kubernetes ecosystem for this inflation. I believe WebAssembly could be the liberating weapon against these rising infra costs.

I see Spin as a small step towards that future of affordable cloud computing. Here's a twitter rant I wrote about the current state of affairs - https://twitter.com/vettijoe/status/1484507483788161026 (warning: Strong opinions ahead)

This is so true. I think this project feels like breathe of fresh air and also forced you to think different on how to go about building serverless stuff.

Someone mentioned about carbon footprint of increase due to containerization and the kubernetes culture during discussion about dagger [1]. Cloud cost, cloud waste and climate impact of current cloud computing setups are some biggest problem of this decade that are often ignored. I think webassembly and frameworks like these are the answer to that problem.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30857012

Hi! (Another one of the Spin authors here)

We have been talking about the efficiency/footprint thing a lot. So many things sit idle in the datacenter, consuming electricity without a good reason. WebAssembly is so fast to startup and shutdown that we think we can actually make a sizable dent into amount of compute required (and hence, amount of electricity consumed) if we can build this tooling right.

Spin took a first pass at this, but there is more we want to do to boost that efficiency even more! Hopefully in a few months I will be able to write a blog post with some progress on this.

Looking forward to write up! Super excited about the project. We might actually end up using it.

You can run your own workloads really cheaply on a self-hosted Kubernetes cluster on a cheap provider like Hetzner or similar. Cloud being expensive is really just because AWS, Google, and Microsoft are milking the enterprise market. If you're a price sensitive cloud customer go somewhere else.

Enterprises were using (wasting) full ec2 instances long before Kubernetes came along. K8s can certainly be used to get more utilization on a small cluster -if that's something you value.

And that's just it, most companies I've seen are content to ship code and deployments that are poorly architected (for performance and efficiency) and poorly performing.

I saw the same thing when I worked in the energy space. Effort is only expended when the ROI is big enough to justify it. And sometimes not even then! It's kind of depressing.

I actually think that the silly high cost of cloud infra can help bring about an appreciation of leaner runtimes (Go, Rust, etc) especially with cheap edge computing (cloud flare workers). That's an uphill battle though.

That said, I can envision a leaner orchestration model ( leaner than k8s) that strongly encourages more efficient computing. I'm excited to see how WASM fits into this, it could be a game changing tool for simplification.

Heh, I've been working on something not that dissimilar from the C++ side in https://github.com/celtera/avendish (at compile time though, but I plan to target WASM so maybe some collaboration's possible) - https://vimeo.com/manage/videos/694659185 ; the definition of the UI widgets don't need to include any library and will be able to compile against Qt and others :)

Cool project

> Github renders text files without line wrappings

Save it as .md not .txt and it should work

Those links are returning 404. Is it a private repo?

Public now. Thanks for pointing out.

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