I'm Syrus, from Wasmer. We built Edge.js in a few weeks after different trials trying to bring Node.js to the Edge. We used AI and Codex heavily for this project, as otherwise the timeline would have spanned to a year plus to develop.
The summary of this announcement is that Edge.js:
* Runs using WebAssembly when in `--safe` mode
* It's fully compatible with Node.js (passing all their spec tests for non-VM modules)
* It has a pluggable JS engine architecture: can work with V8, Javascript, SpiderMonkey, QuickJS, Hermes, etc.
Just wanted to chime in to say this is really cool. I dreamed of building something like this for the Extism ecosystem but it was a huge lift to unlock all the pieces. This looks like lots of innovation all the way down the stack. Kudos!
Thanks Ben! Took us a bit to figure out the best architecture for it, but once it became clear then it was just a matter of implementing the missing bits.
I think the fact that WASIX is much more mature now have helped to increase development speeds quite a bit!
Dumb question: could you run this in frontend js using the browser's js engine and wasm environment similar to WebContainers? Maybe fs is just in-memory, and some things like forking are disabled. It'd be cool to have "nodejs" in the web!
Not sure I understand the use cases. I'm guessing people want to run unsafe nodejs code. Either cloud providers like for lambdas or on personal computer for AI coding? On cloud why is this better than firecracker, firecrack can run any programming language this is just nodejs so already useless for that use case?
For personal computer, people worried about the spin up time of docker? I think that is more of a tooling issue where you spin up one instance and run multiple jobs.
What am I missing? What are actually real use cases where this would be better?
I still prefer Deno because I don't need a separate npm install command, which makes running code that much easier
Being able to import from "https://my-vpn.com/mypackage@1.2.3" or "npm:package@1.2.3" and just running code without having to worry about scaffolding node_modules makes sandboxing code much easier
I don't get it. You mention being able to choose your own JS engine, so it's not using Wasmer's WebAssembly implementation but that of the chosen JS engine's? In other words, can Edge.js use Wasmer? Or have you managed to compile V8/JSC into WebAssembly and are executing it with Wasmer? If so, amazing!
Question regarding the pluggable js engine: I have an electron app where I'm currently using QuickJS to run LLM-generated code. Would edge.js be able (theoretically) to use electron's v8 to get a "sanboxed within electron" execution environment?
Very interesting! On what platforms can this run? If it can run on iOS, how would you handle attempts to access to the file system or networking, is this already wired in somehow? If not is it easy to add custom handlers to handle these actions?
* a refactor of Node.js, but using a standardized API for JS engine interop
* Integration with the Wasmer CLI so it will run JS with v8 but, everything else in Webassembly
Interesting idea.
Could be a much lighter weight way to sandbox JS...
Wow! Node APIs in wasm(wasix)? Something that I have been thinking over for a long time is getting wasm (just wasm, not wasi or com) to be the unit of deployment/packaging for web apps like Nuxt/Next that only depend on, for example SQLite or Postgres. Slightly ignorant question, but would edge.js allow integrating with a caddy plug-in to handle serving the app from wasm?
I know of the extism project and played around with it in elixir, but I'm looking to have CF Workers DX with as little operational complexity as possible for many silly pet projects.
45 comments
I'm Syrus, from Wasmer. We built Edge.js in a few weeks after different trials trying to bring Node.js to the Edge. We used AI and Codex heavily for this project, as otherwise the timeline would have spanned to a year plus to develop.
The summary of this announcement is that Edge.js:
Super happy to answer any questions you may have!> * Runs using WebAssembly when in
--safemodeWhy is safe mode opt-in?
I think this is a cool demo for you to show, at least in my mind this might be a little mind blowing + maybe a db?
I know there are wasm dbs availble that are very light, but so that maybe it's a plus to consider.
I think the fact that WASIX is much more mature now have helped to increase development speeds quite a bit!
Dumb question: could you run this in frontend js using the browser's js engine and wasm environment similar to WebContainers? Maybe
fsis just in-memory, and some things like forking are disabled. It'd be cool to have "nodejs" in the web!For personal computer, people worried about the spin up time of docker? I think that is more of a tooling issue where you spin up one instance and run multiple jobs.
What am I missing? What are actually real use cases where this would be better?
Being able to import from "https://my-vpn.com/mypackage@1.2.3" or "npm:package@1.2.3" and just running code without having to worry about scaffolding node_modules makes sandboxing code much easier
Question regarding the pluggable js engine: I have an electron app where I'm currently using QuickJS to run LLM-generated code. Would edge.js be able (theoretically) to use electron's v8 to get a "sanboxed within electron" execution environment?
Roughly:
* a refactor of Node.js, but using a standardized API for JS engine interop * Integration with the Wasmer CLI so it will run JS with v8 but, everything else in Webassembly
Interesting idea.
Could be a much lighter weight way to sandbox JS...
What is the lifecycle of the sandbox? Can we pause, step-by-step, pause and resume executed code?
(A.K.A. are we IBM 360 yet?)
I know of the extism project and played around with it in elixir, but I'm looking to have CF Workers DX with as little operational complexity as possible for many silly pet projects.