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Comment by thiht | Hacker News Reader

I have a hard time understanding what Wasmer does from their landing page. I understand it runs everything everywhere, unbound and above the cloud, but what does it do? From the name it seems like a very dev oriented product, and I can’t find a single technical word, just buzzwords

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Thanks for the feedback! I'm Syrus, from Wasmer. We are currently working on redesigning the homepage so its easier to know what we do and what is our business value. Stay tuned :)

It's a runtime for WASI blobs (basically a WASM based standard for crossplatform command line tools), for instance:

    emcc hello.c -o hello.wasm
    wasmer hello.wasm
    Hello World!

This uses Emscripten as C compiler, but alternatively you can use the wasi-sdk toolchain instead of Emscripten to build WASI blobs:

- https://github.com/WebAssembly/wasi-sdk

...or Zig as C compiler:

    zig cc -target wasm32-wasi hello.c -o hello.wasm
    wasmer hello.wasm
    Hello World!

...or of course Zig as Zig compiler :)

    zig -target wasm32-wasi hello.zig
    wasmer hello.wasm
    Hello World!

(not sure if the Rust toolchain comes with builtin WASI support, but probably yes).

...or instead of wasmer use another WASI runtime:

- https://github.com/wasmerio/awesome-wasi?tab=readme-ov-file#...

...this is probably the best part of WASM and WASI, there's no 'vendor lock-in'.

> It's a runtime for WASI blobs (basically a WASM based standard for crossplatform command line tools)

Thanks! I wish this was the subtitle on their homepage :)

I mean, it's a Californian tech startup, what did you expect ;)

Anything that isn't "earth-shattering" and "world-changing" would be too pedestrian, especially when your product is essentially a simple cmdline tool for coders (a very useful tool of course but not exactly "glamorous").

From my understandning, it's a runtime that runs webassembly (wasm). So anything that can be compiled to wasm can be runned with this which means it can be executable everywhere wasmer exists.

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