Supper Club × WASM, Fastly Edge, and Polyfill.io with Jake Champion

Any language that can pass to WebAssembly can then use this to run their top level

And what it does is it SDKs for certain like, official SDKs for some languages like Rust, Go, and JavaScript, I work for Fastly as a staff software engineer

And the tool that my, So I can talk about what I use it for, and then I can also talk about what's, like, general good use cases.

scope doesn't usually Like, we don't provide a file system. So,

And Mhmm.

and then generates a new web assembly program applications.

like,

he thought, like, the amount of time that that takes It's,

And that all of that takes a lot of time.

when you visit the,

called Prepack, if you remember

change between each time you evaluate it. Mhmm. And so Facebook were thinking, well, let's

with, Cryptography functions in the browser, the edge, or within Node or Deno. It's the same web crypto API that's within all of them as well, which is so so good.

Prepack. So far, everyone I've mentioned this to, they don't remember it, so this is great if you do. I only remember it because I didn't remember it when we talked about this the first time, and I went and researched it. I remember the name, but I never used it. So my my cursory, The new container?

were working on the JavaScript SDK originally,

Fastly and that's a great use case for it. Yeah. We there's lots of IoT that runs on on Fastly's

It's a Babel plug in by Kent c Dodds called, like, Babel Macros.

With my courses,

I don't know, probably 6 courses that are paid.

And when And

see if you could do that all of that ahead of time.

Oh, yeah. Mhmm. Mhmm. So it's exact like, it's similar to that, except it's on your whole program rather than on specific, like, macros that you've included. And it doesn't require, like, a paper or anything. I just thought of an example in my own code base that I'll give the listeners an idea. So like, writing the So the the top level of your application has already executed, the end state from running those top level instructions.

The the same problem sort of exists for websites where So you'd have to, like,

yeah, knowledge of it. Yeah. I don't think it ever left the research phase, but it was like for example, Fastly's computer edge platform, you know, that's on our infrastructure, but we also offer, like a local and we add our own extra,

That's very different from every other JavaScript runtime. And it was actually a research project originally by preevaluate a a nicer to use you're compiling And they have a HTML, like, Templating 1, which is the streaming Define a common subset of API functionality

So

Facebook,

I have,

Runs the top level of a web assembly program, runs the top level instructions,

you are used to literally the speed of light when you're turning a,

a light switch on, like, it's literally just flipping electrons from one to another. And now,

turning a light on and off or or doing something simple like that, the there At 200 milliseconds, latency is unacceptable

on any of these run times, and it should work with this Common substance. Nice. I'll I'll link that up in the show notes, the proposal that people can check it out. I'm curious about what you think

community group. It aims to create it's a long name.

WebAssembly

CDN as well.

into I create a new version of it that's within And when we're compiling your program to WebAssembly, And then it compiles to arm. Mhmm. And I I think WebAssembly is Yeah. I would like it to go into that direction so users don't

API, It doesn't give you IO or any other kind of, like, system like end engineer But there's like, Spidermonkey, when we compile that to WASI, I think it's about 20 5 megabytes.

Yeah. It's basically to try and make it

Tuya devices. A lot of them have to go all the way to China And come back before they they can do that type of thing. Right? And it could be slow. Did you see there was a Twitter thread just the other day that was, like, I traced where this message from my Tuya bulb went all over the world, and it was like a nightmare. It was

So I think that's that's a kind of a interesting use case for But you can't

And so

We saw that with streams.

Those, part of the minimum run time proposal as well.

but, like, path is one that I see lots of people wanting to use, you know, not just in, like, subset.

and memory.

across different JavaScript runtimes, such as

Sync local storage API that node has is now we're getting a sync context.

One of the proposals is called the minimum common runtime

Yeah. It's it's the web interoperability,

when turning a light on because

And then on the flip side, sometimes you're like, I just want Brains and beef behind it is running in WASM, and then You know? Like, it is, but it isn't. Like, if you you can run it in the browser, And Polyphoto is one of those. That's really cool because I was I was, like, wondering. Sometimes I see these

using request or response constructors.

So they we now have a standard web Stream. And so far that node has implemented it, and then they have a bunch of things. So, like, I think that is the way forward is that, okay, we see these things. It also gives us a chance to fix things we don't like about the node APIs itself?

Deno, Vercel, So it's it's not something that they need to know anything specifically about. That's my

has, like, tried to do even more crypto stuff. And I I've seen, Comm link? Yeah. That enables you to, like, write a function in your JavaScript and then have it

is really helped by using edge functions because if you think about

I I think a lot of those tweets are people are scared of China.

and create a much standard one. And and web streams is amazing because now I can use a web stream in the browser specifically in the browser? I know you said Good for everything.

I do think some of them make Like, the functionality that they that they are offering makes sense. Yeah. But perhaps it's a good time to try and The polyfill. Io open source, free to use did because it it takes them a while to boot up, whereas it takes us 5th as I said, 50 microseconds, so this is pretty much instant.

Oh, yeah. Mhmm. Yeah. Username.

engineers to write JavaScript that will work across the different runtimes.

Node APIs starting to Eek their way into tagging CSS,

with IoT stuff, it has to, like, Go and check what the status is. Are you allowed to do this type of thing? There's all this, like, compute that needs to happen before the relay can even Switch from on to off, and often that compute needs to happen unless you have some sort of elaborate local setup. A lot of that just happens in the cloud. Right? And especially, like, you get into a lot of these, like, Amazon based, Visit the URL and it it sort of builds it on demand. And then with with Vite, you have to, like,

Small self contained So it doesn't know how to it doesn't know about the outside world.

Very depressing. Yeah. Yeah. So,

put that there's quite a few exam we have, like, the developer portal, which lists Slows of different use cases and examples as well. So you're like this, like, blocking bad traffic

So, like, they would all have

Them to, like yeah. Your your crime 110 or something. And so you have these features. Yeah. You mentioned a while ago being winter CG compliant. Do Client, do you want to give the audience a rundown of both what winter CG is and what it takes to be winter CG compliant at a high level?

which doesn't give you much Functionality gives you, like, logic, Computer Edge using JavaScript, So we don't compile your JavaScript to WebAssembly. We take your JavaScript as As it as it is, you it's sourced. You just run that within the SpiderMonkey services.

and Fastly Computer Edge, and some others that I probably can't remember.

So what you've mentioned is, like, exactly true.

Stopped responding. What one other thing I think is is kinda neat with Edge is a lot of IoT stuff that must go to the cloud

or,

their endino. Cloudflare Workers are starting to put a bunch of them in there.

I think Yeah. We saw that with

On these standard APIs. Like, anytime I build I always give this example. Anytime I build a server, I don't reach for express anymore. I reach for Hano JS, which is built on The Wazee, that doesn't make it any smaller, does it? It it depends on, I guess, What

API.

node APIs making their way into a lot of these platforms. Because, like, on one hand, we are trying to build as much as we can requests on in.

What pieces of JavaScript to serve to your user

Yeah.

Like, if you add 2 cells together in Google Docs and run like a Oh, yeah. But this was this was like this was like, here's all of the stops it's making. Yeah. Exactly. And when in reality, it should Try to just go from your phone to your bulb, right, like, if it can.

Google Docs,

those APIs

extends what WASM can do by giving you Full access to things that Docker might need, like you said, as a file system. It all makes sense. I'm so glad that we're having those conversation because it's like, yeah, Wazee runs locally, but I guess, yeah, there there were limitations of the browser, So, like, if it can run-in memory without a file system because I I have it Running.

but it's not it's like, most of the, like,

So you can have access to everything. Yeah. It it gives you it gives you, whatever the host

like, yeah, file system access, then you can use that. Or if it offers you access to a key value store, then you could use that. And whatever it doesn't offer you, you you can't use. So if I don't offer you a file system, your WebAssembly program, even if it was trying to read from a file system, it couldn't.

something that oh, no. I think they compile it straight into JavaScript,

working on supporting running WebAssembly The Fastly JavaScript It's you can also make it be really fast to spin up WebAssembly applications as well. So, aspects of the platform.

targets. Yeah. And Docker, I think, is also now, and can work with, like, promises and, you know,

before we worked on Docker, this is what we would have been using from The beginning. Wow. And they could do that because WASI and then it got Handed over to, Andrew Betts, who you may know. And they're the person that turned it into a, And I think that's where Wazee comes in. Right? So we have a WebAssembly runtime called WASM time, and that you can deploy to What I thought was a really good use case for proxies in JavaScript, because I never really, like, saw a good use case for it before. And that was like, Yes. I can just pretend I'm writing a normal function, and then it's somehow running in a worker, and I don't even I'm not even aware of it. That's cool.

upcoming Component model that's being introduced to it as well. Wow.

rendering across all of the different browsers because it's their own engine that's compiled to a WebAssembly that they're running in them all.

in, world. So we've,

You don't. So it's it's secure on that way. And Oh, yeah. Barcode scanner running on a web page is is really good. But I also thought is a, like, there was work done by my team before I joined, Lacon,

Like, it's and that's, like, the capability, like, based security that's within to WebAssembly.

Wild stuff. Wild, yeah, wild project. Often people say, oh, Figma's running on WebTech, and it's like, it kinda isn't.

It's massive. Yeah. It's massive. Yeah. And, I mean, it's one of the best performing apps in that. I mean, you would never even be able to tell it was running on web tech at all.

But it's it's the same idea is that you don't have to rewrite it for multiple,

you, like,

Time value money calculation that was written in Java and then they run it,

I believe. Yeah. Really? artifact that you can then, at the edge,

stuff because they need Google Docs.

that needs to run on your your phone. It needs to run on a Chromebook. It needs to run-in the web browser. It needs to run on Android and iOS, and

So, I mean, that goes to show you how powerful Yeah. I think they have their own, like, font engine that they that they implemented as well. So, like, They can have the same point And if the

That's what their CTO of Docker said,

Or opening a file is Sigma in WASI and the wants to offer to you. So if your host offers

very specialized at this point still.

these types of, like,

Yes. Exactly that. And so, like, any languages that can compile to WebAssembly. Whereas if we were using, like, VA or Node. Js, then

sort of implementation

runtime?

like, a an interpreter,

like, I've taken the entire Node. Js runtime and,

For 25 megs.

to Wazee.

And,

IO or any host functionality of, like, getting the time the reason, like, that's that was a thing the other ones then it's maybe not 1 you you want to be implementing.

like, compiled it,

So do you wanna give, like, a really basic overview of

like, More than 25 megabytes if you're requesting, like, all of the internationalization Kyle Flow workers, SpiderMonkey compiled to WebAssembly and then runs your JavaScript code inside of this SpiderMonkey Docasaurus

is making available to WebAssembly, They don't have to know about it. They can target it. And if they want to learn the specifics about it for some, like, advanced optimizations that they want to do, they can then look into to using it. But, yeah, I would hope that it becomes Yeah. So I've made, like, a hacker news client That runs on Computer Edge, my own website.

What is

on your local machine, There's no, like, cold boot or, like, cold start or hot start or warming up. None of this. It's just always that and then pack that up into a new JavaScript file that we ship. That's why it's called prepack.

of it as well, which uses the same, and the runtime has already, like, initialized.

And it's like 50 megs or something like that. Right? You can't put that on a on a microcontroller.

And, like, who should be interested in

what what is WebAssembly

So there's the QuickJS, place for running your code.

I can run I could run it on anything that is The request response fetch API, it's beautiful because it works literally everywhere, and it doesn't matter where you're gonna deploy. And anytime they reach for a package, I try to figure out, is it I I think that would be such a killer tool. Other people don't seem to, like, have the same problem as me where I just have lots of demos. But for the new syntax website, we're we're kinda talking about that as well. A demo engine. Yeah? So I think I've never used feed, but I presume it assumes there's a file system

particularly well suited for?

in inter interfaces or in the web, that I care, what w g And,

interfaces.

is what is what WASI is templates, and then it's I get a streaming response back. It's not, like, buffering it to compile the whole template, Yeah. You can write your own applications just for using WASI to run on your machine as well. It doesn't have to be,

Has a Wazee

then like Rust, Then your wazee binary that you get from compiling is much small. Let's take a wider view about, the worker tools, HTML template library. And then when I need storage,

Which is very small, and you can compile that to WASI.

which is useful for local development.

WASM time runtime.

So you could write, is

System There's a talk by my colleague Nick Nick Fitzgerald on this tool that they ended up inventing called Weiser.

WebAssembly. Since Y'all do so much web assembly stuff. We don't get to talk to that many folks who do that much web assembly concerning it. It feels very,

ever

or creating a socket, Automatic failover. If you have, like, multiple

JavaScript runtime, Edge is 99 pops around the

applications and then use them in Node. Js as well. Oh, that's cool. And it's really useful if your platform is, like, inherently secure based on the just from the language that it supports because WebAssembly itself is So I combine that with Hano, and that's, like, my my ideal setup.

run times.

and I didn't even know about this one, which turns out It's a very popular huge one out there. It's called Fastly.

accompanying runtime, If you don't have a file assistant, colleagues made called Wiser does that, but for WebAssembly.

but I work on I also help out on the other SDKs and any sort of computer edge related because that's the only other ones I have except for my work one, is,

about about a month ago, just to talk about what was going on, it kind of all of this Happened when I was working on a talk about A front

Thank you for having me on. This is gonna be fun.

I had seen the logo pop up a few times but never looked into it properly. And then

between the 2. Hey, Jake. Thanks so much for coming on.

Lots

SDK and my HTML For the JavaScript SDK,

And then some people know that Cloudflare Workers is its own thing. And then I like, once I started pulling that thread, I realized that, like, wow, there's actually And send it from the server, and I can literally just cancel it because they're standard APIs, and you just call it cancel method, and it's It's so beautiful. Yeah. The same thing happened with the crypto as well. So Node. Js implements the web crypto API. So if you want to use

As I was going back and forth with I think it was Jake on Twitter about, like, how it works, and it's it runs on Spidermonkey and all this kind of cool stuff. I was like, this is we gotta do a show on that. This is so cool. So,

Excited to have him on to talk about both of those things as well as I think there's there's quite a bit of overlap, Node APIs. Like, maybe the standard is is Node APIs. What what are your thoughts on

alternative JavaScript runtimes, which is we have Node and then we have Deno.

and

APIs into the,

streams.

the browser where you run WebAssembly?

The winter CG,

Like, how can you compile the thing that runs WebAssembly So the output was just a single file.

SpiderMonkey on its own is just like ECMA 262, Also means that I get to benefit from Using the product that I help build, which helps find out if, I'm Jake Champion.

to WebAssembly

servers or wherever you like or run it on your machine or I can embed it in a browser. So the the WASM time is the runtime that we use that run executes all of the WebAssembly a bit too long. And so they were working on a way to there's this group of libraries

WebAssembly runtime.

as well.

runtime server runtime.

to make SpiderMonkey able to be compiled using Hohono for the,

JavaScript runtime because

And so the JavaScript SDK for Fastly

You need the whole the web? So we yeah. You need those ourselves, yeah, and add those to it. Yes. Because we're trying to Alibaba, using Fastly's computer edge SDK.

And I am a big fan of worker tools. I included this in my talk as well. I would love to actually have,

And that's running on Fastly's computer edge network and also sponsored by Fastly so I don't

across the whole, like, tech ecosystem.

which is a a good amount of requests. No kidding. No kidding. That It's unreal. And, like, not even just requests, but you're you're literally serving up JavaScript,

quite a bit for older browsers?

projects, We do

need to think about it. They just say, my website uses these features. I put the script tag into polyford io. I know

firstly have a Fast Forward program that sponsors And we can run those on our platform, but any other language can that can support WASI and WebAssembly can run there as well. So there's community SDKs for, like, Swift and Zig, and there was one What this means for JavaScript is it ends up running your top level scope of your JavaScript application.

websites Like, poly fillet o and unpackage So you you don't have to, like, worry about necessarily where it's running. You just wrap it in a

for all of them. And I guess it depends. Like, it could be as As little as probably nothing. Right? And as as large as ComputeEdge, you wanna give us a quick rundown of of who you are, what you do, whatnot before we get into it? Yeah. Okay.

So, Polly said, I get Just over a 1,000,000,000 requests today, implementation so that you can do console dot log, and it works when you wherever you deploy it help maintain Run as a web worker, and you're like it's sort of, like, transparent to you that it's in a web worker. Oh, that's nice.

Have to pay for the infrastructure costs. I know. Firstly

procedural RPC.

What would your Stack b. So far, my personal projects, To figure out what browser you are then.

proxy in So there's a subset of them that I think Might make sense, to to have in these runtimes. And then there's there's the other ones where it makes less sense. So, like, the file system, you know, the APIs.

Streaming it through and pauses whenever there's, like That's yes. To resolve. Yeah. Yeah.

if,

Key value stores, all kinds of interesting things.

But there's all kinds of

And you just have full access to it. That's really nice. It's it's that's sort of like the,

you it looks like you're trying to access any language. So, like, maybe you have, like, a weird the dev behind this on it because he's put out

a a property.

Yeah. Oh, that's cool. So a proxy

so that you don't have to keep going back and forth.

the ability to About,

I would presume Yeah. I think there's a tweet by them a while ago where they were said, like, if this existed like, request to read a file in the file system.

I see. Yeah. I think my favorite tag template one is,

That's genius. Yeah. I reckon it's something like that. It's, I guess, very similar to HTTP

the dom. I'm using air quotes here,

converting,

end, I guess, like a back end, like APIs. It hits hits URLs, things like that.

Tools, and the website is worker.tools.

A a proxy. And when you can grab that and run your own code,

and do the output. So I guess in the actual proxy resolver there, they then run the web worker and Return the values of that.

Worker

its own environment. Right? It doesn't have the DOM.

what are we talking about? Where sanitization,

that they could give to the WebAssembly, in Rust or c plus plus or c or Zig or And so you can run your your application the, like, ECMA 262

comlink.wrap, running on this? Because we get this question a lot where we talk about edge, we talk about serverless, we talk about distributing

DOM purifying,

So if you were building 15 years ago. And are you gonna reimplement that in JavaScript? And The answer to that is no. They I'm pretty sure they said they use WASM. They compile it from Java into, I love using Vite locally because you can just

is

readable streams and anything, like, generators, async functions.

I don't see why that wouldn't be out of the the realm of possibility. It's just not what they have yet, because I don't think any browsers implement

There's a party town created a whole bunch of APIs that allowed you to sort of work with the

Wazee. That's kind of similar to, like, So I bet I love tech like that because We the same thing happened with tag template literals. When tag template literals came out in ES 6, we had, like, a bunch of, like, examples of how to use it and whatnot, and Everyone's just like, okay. But, like, like, what are we gonna use this for?

MySQL,

But, like, I've heard I've heard that, like, if you have to go back between the JavaScript First of all, he polyfilled the entire Cloudflare HTML Rewriter API, which is a really cool API for, like, intercepting,

RPC, remote procedural call. You just call a function, but it's really running on the server. Yeah. It's similar to All of the stuffing that makes it transparent is so nice. Yeah. I posted a link from a a smashing mag post from Surma about web workers, including talking about Commlink in the show notes. So you wanna dive in more? That was, I think, the first time that I saw a, like,

yeah,

Use his wedding, which is Yes. Sometimes they just have to, like, sit on the tack until a really good use case comes around and people go, ah,

Remote I have all these, like, demos why

and streaming Yeah. Oh, definitely. It was, so Jake and I had a little call,

They make JavaScript libraries that work across, you know, the different worker runtimes.

Yeah. And you have the, So, like, WebAssembly on its own, if you've only got, like, reading it for, like, a web browser, it's like you Pass out their data. It can do some computation on it and give you back the bit of data, but it can't do, like, network requests or or anything like that. And Wazee lets you be able to do that extra part. So is is Wazee something that could, like I could run that on my computer locally? Like if I had a like a WASM application, runtime One of the core committees has, like, made a proposal to And the config store that they have, which is like a way of having,

template rendering WebAssembly There's a similar project for specifically for JavaScript.

a

Comm link.

That's my favorite one. Like, just use tag templates there, writing my JavaScript is the language, and then you, Yeah. If you were using, you know, a different language that doesn't need, to the web web crypto, The browser that I support will now have those features.

or accessing getters or setters These ComputeEdge I didn't even think about the the Polyfill IO as well. Right? Because you need to be able to figure out

functions to

promises,

And I'm pretty sure the view layer is running in in JavaScript. And we we talked to the guys from Google Docs as well. And and that's how they run a lot of the

Wasm bridge

application for it to then modify parts of the DOM.

what's the project made by Surma?

on an object, and you sort of, like, step in between and go, oh, yoink. I'm actually

Intercepts requests Yeah. Does whatever it wants. Mhmm. Can send it back to an origin or return a new response.

sort of intercept

But in reality,

too many times, That could be a bit of a bottleneck. Is that true? That's true with WASM on its own. Yes. Because it can only like, you you can give it a bit of data and it can operate on it.

JSON fetch,

shipping good products because you'll find everything.

in production. So whenever somebody hits a URL, it just Compiled it on demand, and I actually got it to work pretty well.

to get that to run on, like, Fastly Compute at Edge because then I wouldn't even need to have a build step.

configuration compliant as it's, like, website generator. Mhmm. And that all runs on ComputerEdge as well.

And I I was thinking, like, it would be really cool to, like, go even a step further and try to get

the documentation or the API and, like, make it friendlier to use. So I always try and

Link tag to a CSS file that has, like, unsupported browser stuff. And

Yeah. I try and do as much as I can then, avoid deploying to anything else.

like, folder that's full of hundreds and hundreds of demos

that you have on the other,

that I use Vite for. It's the best because you have an HTML, and you can use a script tag to a TypeScript file. You can use Worker ready is is what I call it. Right? Like, will it run-in on all these different platforms?

for the JavaScript SDK for Computer Edge, That's that we've compiled to WebAssembly, Anything else that can harm parter Customer's code, which is untrusted code,

One thing I really wanna make is, you can compile

you have to bundle them all. Right? And I have I have this, of different run times out there, like web workers, where web workers are its own environment. Right? It's not server. It's not Browser, it's

I use I try and do everything using Fastly's compute platform. So I use, like, their

Variables on your service similar to environment variables, Node. Js also supports the WASI, specification to try and add even more functionality into it, which that's perfect because then if it does land, it will be in browsers and everyone else for everyone to use. Can you explain what WASI is and how that relates to WASM?

run times.

run on request. It's so fast. Yeah. And and, like, Moe, you could probably throw the

Yeah. The one that I've been working on but I haven't finished or published yet is for personal authentication at the edge, personalization

v dev mode

I don't know if Vite runs on things that aren't Node. Js, but

I could just have the whole thing

where it's gonna read the content from. Yes.

You know, you'll find all the the edges.

that I use for my TikToks and Twitter and and everything like that. And I went down the rabbit hole of trying to run

The documentation Build a project using whatever thing I'm working on. Yeah. I think that's always a a big key to, be able to change that part to read from here, like, provide a function to it instead where you can then control my my view on it. Like, you don't usually think about, Like, create all of the the realm of your JavaScript and create the globals, and then it has to pass your

The output into a key value store and cache it or or maybe even use CDN to cache the output of it at some point. But

I can improve

your actual compute tasks To as close to the user as possible.

to spin up a customer's WebAssembly Yeah. That'd be really cool.

instances either, which is something that you'll see on, like, The other platforms are like Lambda. Like, you see that your instance sticks around, and you can, like, restate across it. That's not something that Yeah. And then you also get your Is that right?

By using WebAssembly, it also means that we support source code, transparent

if you can compile your code to a WebAssembly. So if you're a platform where you're running

Whereas Mhmm. If we just put WebAssembly on its own. You can write your application there's lots of talks, by our CTO on this, actually. So we could we could point to those. But, basically, WebAssembly is like a really secure sandbox, Fastly and then create a new program based on that. And it's It means that you can do, like, lots of computation in the top level scope of your JavaScript program if you wanted to. And all of that's done when you compile your program before you even, Like, deployed it anywhere? a very minimal and secure secure language. It simplifies the security, called Worker

is,

guarantees,

What type of stuff are people

We have personal uses, like a CMS for Pricing of content on just all within computer edge and not using any other like, CDN and got the sponsorship from Fastly.

It's always the same, and we don't reuse, And using mainly on the computer edge JavaScript within the the computer edge platform and just serve it from all of our our pops, never have to go to your your origin.

application.

So, like, as I mentioned, Polyfil is completely on computer edge. There's no back ends to it. There's no, like, infrastructure that I maintain or have to scale up or scale down. So you can run, like, a big

And everything is fine for me. So, like Mhmm. Like, who are the customers of Fastly where they need this type of speed and or what are the types of things that is is good for this?

that we have to put into

your,

to WebAssembly.

it takes us 50 microseconds like, when you boot up a JavaScript runtime, it has to, is c plus plus that compiles to WebAssembly. The whole application is WebAssembly.

You can write a computer edge application that redirects your traffic, but if one of your origins You could have that And we just need to get more languages to support the compiling down to WebAssembly so that the Node. Js so

And But, yeah, Polycom is like it does the what's now frowned upon user agent sniffing Like, any website multiple times, you're having to redownload the same JavaScript file while you've got it cached, but you're then still having to, like, Repass it and evaluate the the program. And, like, that top level like, we've had many years of using the node ones. Maybe we maybe we've figured out some issues with them and could offer they have like a WebAssembly API, but you're still having to spin up A whole JavaScript run time to then run your WebAssembly in. So it's like a bit

application like Polyfil. Io where it's doing lots of computation and, like, dynamic

your code in, And so you get good security

or, KV store

that you can also have like, what we what I see being it being used for is, But their computer edge network, their platform is newer than the CDN offering that they have as well. Do you know Jonathan Neal? He's quite a prolific overseas.

it's a lot more work to be to be doing.

doing

yet. Who knows if we offer it in the future? But, server or edge Run times, but also, like, in the in the browser, that they just want to be able to, like, join things together and pretend it's a path and normalize it.

we have to run a server that runs this language, then we have to send HTTP requests back and forth between the browser and the server to communicate with it. So the idea with WASM is that

Doesn't need to worry that they're write but they're writing in a JavaScript or Rust or whatever other language, and they just view it as another target that they, When or if browser supported Wazee, they could offer

in COBOL. Right?

I I think for for everyone listening, like, if you're still not sure what WASM is, just before And sometimes it takes. Now there's all kinds of use cases for tag template literals out there. You've for Ruby and another one for Haskell. And so they they could just if This web if it's WebAssembly, it can run on Fastly's computer edge platform. That's what kinda blew my mind with all of this because you think, oh, it's another JavaScript At runtime, they probably slap Node. Js on the box. And then when somebody hits a URL, they spin up Node. Js instance. And it's not that at all. So they have, like, all kinds of interesting

The the answer to that is you can literally run any language A the way that it was explained to me, and I'll let you explain a little bit more, is that I I know that people are really trying to get Veet to work with Dino.

meaning that, like, if you're building something And you're but you you think, oh, we want this to run-in the browser, so we have to build it in JavaScript The calling of functions Why do that instead of just running Node. Js on a server? What's the benefit of doing all those Jumping through hoops and and creating an entirely new What were those?

or I'm running a

like, ah, shoot. Like, now we have to reimplement the whole thing or, like, You have some detection, And then we often hear from people being like, I'm just running, like, 1 render server in Ohio

Learning more about diving into WebAssembly. My my opinion is it's suited to everything.

You can

compile that language down to WASM and then run it in the WASM. It's it's not as easy as I'm I'm saying. I'm sure it's it's Incredibly difficult, but,

and just gives you a secure,

that's the whole idea is that you can run it. And then Wazee takes it even 1 step further in that you don't just have to run I need to check that, but that's what I think. Well, it's it's honestly quite amazing that that can fit in 25 megs, though. Like, people talk about how big JavaScript is. But you literally get the probably the most powerful dynamic runtime

in the browser, and Wazee extends

can and that's trying to

run. Exactly.

That compiled WASM in the browser, you can literally run it anywhere

WASI runs.

a tree counter AI thing where you take a picture and it counts how many trees are in a photo, but that's written

barcode scanner app That's written in c plus plus Right? And you want to be able to, like, integrate that into your app and, is that type of thing? Because I often see these things. I'm like, wouldn't that be cool to throw that on A microcontroller.

Nice.

can compile 2.

Nice.

system interface, JavaScript generation at the edge And do all of that in in computer ash,

so any application that can compile to WebAssembly and specifically WebAssembly,

a platform that runs web assembly applications,

they take your application a payment time value money calculation on the on the results of that,

provide that you can run When someone ran your program, if they gave you access to that part of the VAR system, you will have access to to it. And if they didn't, then That's exactly correct. Yeah. And you can also then, with Wazee,

It can run on Fastly's platform.

as assembly code. And that's why it is It's so fast. And it it kinda just like I couldn't guess through my head. I was like, but isn't how large Probably maybe a cash register. You know? Like, it has to run everywhere. But, like, are you really gonna reimplement

which is the the JavaScript engine inside of,

what it is, and specifically,

the Fastly

platform assembly like language, route handling and the middleware logic,

take SpiderMonkey, as quickly as possible, Is there anything that, like, Wasm is not good for, we saw that with the,

And they

Firefox, it doesn't necessarily have to run-in the browser.

And they compile both of those to WASM,

the WASI, any other kind of architectures that you're targeting when you're you just use your compiler and you say, I want to target ARM, origins around the world or just like in different data centers, addition to WebAssembly.

So let's talk about Fastly. Can you explain It will run-in memory,

because that's kinda what we're interested in here. Yeah. So the Fastly computer edge,

We'll talk about what that is in just a second. As well as, he is the author maintainer, we'll we'll let him explain it, behind polyfill. Io.

Wash those hands, pull up a chair, and secure that feed bag, because it's time to listen to Scott Tolinski and Wes Bos attempt to use human language to converse with and pick the brains of other developers. I thought there was gonna be food,

I sure hope you're hungry.

Welcome to Cintax. Today, we've got an awesome show for you today. We have Jake Champion on and all that. And I was like, that has got to cost a pretty penny to host this thing. Like you I think you'd, like, rattled off some traffic numbers that you're getting in my mouth.

This

so buckle up and grab that old handle because this ride is going to get wild.

Who works

at Fastly, a web service that had

which is a

is the Syntax supper club.

I'm not gonna say new, but it is a edge compute platform.

Oh, I'm starving.

JavaScript's

SDK runtime different from all the others, which we haven't mentioned here. And I think we should talk about it because I think it's It's really so that you can run your code

cool, on Fastly's edge, and Fastly's

Turn it into a syntax tree, and then it can start interpreting it and then optimizing it, etcetera.

from a file system or a KB store.

with the abstraction as well. I can't remember the name of that one.

and you can get the output of it. And and I even went I even inlined all of the CSS,

JavaScript and images to base 64.

we should talk about or not, but the other one, we I think we should because it's very different.

It runs in memory. If you run Vee programmatically,

That it's a very like, one thing makes or serving if you have, like, static content, And it's so that the intention is to make it simpler for So it doesn't have, like, fetch request response

But,

and that is, CDN that serves polyfills to browsers, but in a Performant way. So you can, like you make a request saying, I need to fetch polyfill, and then we go, wow. You've just you're the latest is Chrome. You don't need to fetch polyfill, so we send you back nothing.

Once that's out or maybe it maybe it already does, I bet then we'll be able to build something like that. We should try it when that happens. Yeah. That would be really cool. Yeah. And, we introduced the we have a cache API so that you can then put stuff into the CDN cache as well. Oh, sweet. There's 1 thing we haven't well, there's 2 things. One of them, I don't know about is unhealthy or,

that is an April fools joke or it's too good to be true because it just does all that for you. Right?

probably a substantial amount of traffic Like this for so long now. Yeah. And from the beginning, it was,

it's been, a console

languages and datasets as well.

more than a decade, I think now. Yeah. I remember when this was first announced because it seemed kind of like,

Io, And WASI is a way of introducing,

And then I took it from Andrew when he left Financial Times to join Fastly, and then I left Central times and joined Fastly.

there would be things dropped like this that were always seen as, like, kind of joke projects. So like, Oh, here's a service that fixes all your CSS. Just drop in drop in the script. But I remember seeing polyfill dot I o being announced

APIs and your browser doesn't doesn't have those at all. Have to serve all of those,

And

But I took Polycom. Io with me.

my boss's reaction was,

Yeah. So they originally built polyfill.

dot io been been around? Oh,

So I remember when this first came out. So it's it's amazing that y'all have been hitting

sponsored for by Fastly as well. It was originally a project that Oh, so Fastly's been around. Yeah. Fastly's been around for 12 years now.

there there was a a time when

Or your IE 10, and then we say, oh, you need fetch, but you also need promise and you need all these other ones that fetch users internally, so we send you all of those. So then Developers don't

I also And it can get quite big. How long has polyfil, alongside their containers that they support as well. Do you think that might be the Yeah. The largest one is, like,