Wasmer Blog
medium.com/wasmer · Company blog · on HN since 2019
The Wasmer team, who build a WebAssembly runtime, post about running WebAssembly outside the browser, with benchmarks, releases and demos.
What HN saysHN commenters link it for Wasmer announcements such as wapm and the Postgres extension, and one is impressed by its performance, noting its LLVM backend.
26HN people shared it
8linked it in comments
28stories submitted
677story points
3 years agolast shared
2019people per year2026
Most-shared posts
- 1Standalone WebAssembly games using I/O devices4 people · 143 points · first shared 2020 · 128 comments on HN
- 2PostgreSQL WASM Extension3 people · 56 points · first shared 2019 · 2 comments on HN
- 3Webassembly and CloudABI – A Match Made in Heaven3 people · 14 points · first shared 2019 · 1 comments on HN
- 4Webassembly.sh – online WebAssembly Terminal to run WASI modules on the browser3 people · 10 points · first shared 2019 · discussion on HN
- 5Running WebAssembly on the Kernel3 people · 5 points · first shared 2019 · discussion on HN
- 6Benchmarking WebAssembly Runtimes3 people · 4 points · first shared 2019 · discussion on HN
- 7Wasmer 1.02 people · 342 points · first shared 2021 · 161 comments on HN
- 8Running WebAssembly on ARM with Wasmer 0.11 (Demo on a Raspberry Pi)2 people · 15 points · first shared 2019 · 3 comments on HN
- 9Embedding WebAssembly in your Rust application2 people · 10 points · first shared 2019 · discussion on HN
- 10Introducing WebAssembly Interfaces1 people · 24 points · first shared 2019 · 3 comments on HN
- 11WebAssembly and SIMD1 people · 19 points · first shared 2019 · 3 comments on HN
- 12Show HN: Wasienv – WebAssembly WASI Development Toolchain for C/C++1 people · 8 points · first shared 2019 · 2 comments on HN
- 13Running WebAssembly / WASI in JavaScript with Wasmer-JS1 people · 7 points · first shared 2019 · discussion on HN
- 14Running WebAssembly on the Kernel1 people · 4 points · first shared 2019 · discussion on HN
- 15Running WebAssembly from Any Language: Wasmer1 people · 4 points · first shared 2019 · discussion on HN
What HN people wrote when they linked it
syrusakbary · 2019-04-23
Hi HN!
We have also published an article to showcase wapm:
https://medium.com/wasmer/announcing-wapm-the-webassembly-package-mana…
Would love to hear your thoughts!
coder543 · 2021-02-08
Awesome! I had heard of wasmer before, but I didn't realize its performance was that good yet. I'll definitely be paying closer attention to this space now.
Although, on closer inspection it seems like wasmer is using LLVM as a backend to get that good performance, which tempers my enthusiasm a little bit. I see that wasmer also supports the Cranelift backend, but the promised performance blog post[1] doesn't seem to have been published yet, so I don't know how much of a difference that makes in the real world.
A ~13x difference in JIT compile time (LLVM vs Cranelift) is huge, and waiting on LLVM itself to compile can also be... exciting. LLVM does good work for AOT compilation, but I don't know how I feel about the trade-offs of using it as a JIT. If a massive C++ code base is going to be pulled in anyways, I would almost rather them pull in V8 than LLVM... but that's just my opinion, since V8 seems to be very well optimized for the JIT use case.
But, I'm glad there is the choice to use Cranelift (and presumably exclude LLVM from the final binary) if that fits a particular use case, and I'm excited to see that follow-up blog post whenever the wasmer team has time to publish it.
[1]: https://medium.com/wasmer/wasmer-1-0-3f86ca18c043
niutech · 2024-01-27
WebGPU is only in web browsers and WASM runs everywhere. There should be a standard cross-platform API for WASM GUI apps. Framebuffer is the lowest common denominator and <canvas> may be its implementation in web browsers. See also: https://medium.com/wasmer/wasmer-io-devices-announcement-6f2a6fe23081
TUSF · 2022-11-24
Other than some fantasy consoles like WASM-4, which have some retro-inspired limitations, there isn't really a standard way to do any kind of GUI in Wasm yet. Wasmer has a non-standard way[1], which they hide behind compilation flags, and involves writing to a bitmap framebuffer, so no hardware acceleration.
[1]: https://medium.com/wasmer/wasmer-io-devices-announcement-6f2a6fe23081
burggraf · 2022-10-04
This exists, but with limitations: [0][1]
[0]https://medium.com/wasmer/announcing-the-first-postgres-extension-to-r…
[1]https://github.com/wasmerio/wasmer-postgres
ArrayBoundCheck · 2022-07-13
I'm not sure which implementation browsers use but only one engine wasn't on average < 3x slower https://medium.com/wasmer/benchmarking-webassembly-runtimes-18497ce0d7…
gnfargbl · 2021-11-01
Unfortunately, that is WASM on postgres, not postgres on WASM: https://medium.com/wasmer/announcing-the-first-postgres-extension-to-r…
tcoff91 · 2019-12-16
I think I remember reading something on HN about some kind of tool for running WASM in some kind of kernel module to speed up app performance.
EDIT: here it is: https://medium.com/wasmer/running-webassembly-on-the-kernel-8e04761f1d…