Show HN: Blueboat is an all-in-one, multi-tenant serverless JavaScript runtime | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Blueboat is an all-in-one, multi-tenant serverless JavaScript runtime

blueboat.io

123 pointslosfair51 comments

This sounds quite a bit like Cloudflare Workers, and they have a comparison page - https://github.com/losfair/blueboat/wiki/Comparison-with-Clo....

Comparison looks inaccurate, judging by https://developers.cloudflare.com/workers/learning/using-web...

I think the comparison is just old, it used to be accurate.

- Cloudflare Workers now supports WebSocket.

- Cloudflare Workers now supports strongly-consistent storage / ACID transactions with Durable Objects.

- Cloudflare Workers is becoming open source, but not there yet (I am refactoring the code for this as we speak): https://twitter.com/KentonVarda/status/1523666343412654081

(Disclosure: I'm the tech lead for Cloudflare Workers.)

What language(s) is Cloudflare Workers written in?

C++

(Sorry. Rust wasn't ready yet when we started.)

Any progress on open sourcing it? I can see the announcement was done in may

Just posted a (small) update, actually: https://twitter.com/KentonVarda/status/1552052028595208197

Cloudflare Workers might be great if people were allowed to try it out, but there is an interogation screening step that involves a Zoom call in the free tier process which is a bit of a blocker tbh.

Huh? No there isn't. It's completely self-service, no talking to anyone, unless you are going for an enterprise account.

Ok then I was wrong, I can login now. Perhaps it was a UI issue, but I was directed to filling out a contact form after trying to sign up for the Workers KV, which then prompted me to booking a Zoom call via email. That was what I was talking about, so I probably ended up for the enterprise sign up somehow. :/ Sorry for that confusion.

Yeah, it sounds like somehow the system thought you were enterprise. If you see that again please file a ticket, it shouldn't be happening.

Ok I checked again. The landing page at https://www.cloudflare.com/en-gb/products/workers-kv/ both the main `Sign Up` and `Contact Sales` buttons point to the same contact sales form so I guess I clicked on that Sign Up button when I wanted to try it out. This doesn't happen in the other Sign Up links, like the one up right and the Get Started links in the pricing/overview pages. They go straight to Sign Up. I will try to file a ticket if I can.

Thanks, I'll pass that along to the right people.

This is now fixed. Thanks for the pointer.

What are you talking about? Just sign us and use it. https://workers.dev/

I'd love to see a multi-tenant, low cold-start, runtime like this, but with no additional JS APIs for databases, pub-sub, etc. I'd want to provide any I/O or storage myself via built-in modules.

If you want to fully go DIY, I hacked together a POC V8 isolate based runtime using Go (and the rogchap.com/v8go module). It was super simple, POST JavaScript to an endpoint, get back an url to invoke that JavaScript. It was about 200 lines of code, and most of that was the api endpoint side of things.

I’d add an option for disabling “cold starts” and make them persistent. An annoying concept amazon came up with to save costs on their end. Other than that it’s pretty neat.

It also just looks terrible. Yeah I totally want to adopt this in 2022 first.

Past thread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29321442

Congrats on the launch, Heyang! Excited for you and the awesome work on Blueboat/Magicboat

Neat. This looks like a good lightweight solution for your own lambda/edge worker clone. Built in multi-tenant is a nice touch.

Quite refreshing to see a major JS project not pulling in a billion requirements in it's package.json file!

I think you're confusing projects written in NodeJS with this, which is a runtime for executing JS

Sort of related - the website design is beautiful. So clean and to the point. I checked the source and it's Tailwind :) Very well executed and a great inspiration me to look into source code for my own designs.

Tailwind improves design now?

Some people are funny hey.

It has solid defaults and ratios which make it much easier to get layout essentials like spacing and font sizing right.

This is really neat. I'm a little sad that it requires rewriting of your js app to make it work with it but still. I'm going to tinker with this for sure.

No V8? The website explicitly says that Blueboat combines Google's state-of-the-art V8 JavaScript engine, process-level snapshots, and Rust to speed up everything from cold start to runtime performance.

I didn’t see that until after. Sad, v8 is a massive library.

When we wrote the initial version of V8, it was reasonably small :)

This is great stuff, I would definitely be trying it out. If the owner is here, can I get beta access to MagicBoat?

I don't understand how its offering differs from existing cloud offerings from AWS, Cloudflare and Netlify

This is open source so you can compete with AWS, Cloudflare, and Netlify.

I was setting up an on-prem lambda function worker the other day but the current alternatives like OpenWhisk are huge complex beasts for what I needed. This looks like a good alternative :)

Well it's similar to how a local email server differs from using Gmail. You run the local server and deploy it on any hardware / cloud stack you like!

Is there something like this for python?

Is it faster than Deno and Node because it’s more efficient or because there’s less code.

I want to punch a drywall each time when I read "serverless".

I felt the same with “big data” 5 years ago

It should have been "sysadminless", which is equally accurate (sysadmins still exist) but truer to the purpose of these technologies.

"Self service" has been right there for ages as a recognized term. We have automats, laundromats (or washaterias regionally), buffets, vending machines, self-service gasoline, photo printing kiosks, and so on.

It isn’t just a buzzword though. I take it to mean “sys admin handled for you” but there is a spectrum. Clearly with this if you self host it is serverful again to some extent.

Serverless means not dealing with user accounts, operating systems, opening ports, nginx, updates etc.

AKA managed.

The PHP based “CPanel” of the early 2000s is of course also serverless!

"Serverless" has a pretty widely-accepted meaning now, as mentioned in other replies. You provide the application code, the platform provides the runtime environment, OS and interfaces. You should probably move on.

Just like "postmodern": Once a core of people embrace the term, the fact that it is contradictory and meaningless loses importance. In a way it is an upgrade from naming every phenomenon for the person most closely associated with it.

Yes, agreed. To me "serverless" means that the application is entirely client-side, running in a browser without depending on any backend except whatever httpd originally sent you the .html, .css and .js files.

Anything else has servers, and calling it "serverless" is stupid.

If it serves files it’s a fucking server, even if it’s just serving static HTML, CSS, and JS files.

I am definitely not an expert, but aren't there plenty of Javascript runtimes already? What does this do differently?

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