PGlite – Postgres in WASM

Awesome! Will check it out

join us on the Extism discord https://extism.org/discord, we're working on some things that will enable this. would love to hear what you're thinking!

It can persist data to indexedDB, so web applications can use it if they want a more flexible alternative

Code testing is a big one for me. I'm currently using in-memory sqlite for tests and I'm often running into differences between sqlite and postgres (default values, JSON handling, etc). This could allow me to use the real thing without running a full Docker instance.

I think performance and cost are the big motivators here.

I work on a web framework for building data apps like reports and dashboards, and we use duckDB’s WASM runtime for interactions (e.g when a user changes a date range filter). It’s really fast, and you don’t spend snowflake credits.

No one using postgres in the cloud is going to use this as an alternative, but there are at least two use cases where this could be very useful:

- You want your app to be local first (snappy, great offline support, etc) but sync data to a server. This is the ElectricSQL use case.

- You want a serious data store in-browser. SQLite via wasm already fits this use case, but it's nice to have options.

The previous PG WASM projects from Crunchy and Snaplet have run Postgres in a VM and required a large 32MB download.

This is pure WASM, no VM, 3.7MB download. Plus it has persistent storage.

Yup, this is based on work by Neon. Also the Neon model allows you to sync in a database on demand, whilst scaling to zero when you’re not using it.