Running in a browser

[chensce]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.

If we can run the wasm workers server in browser, we can run it anywhere.

Describe the solution you'd like

we know the browser (chrome)have Wasm runtime

Describe alternatives you've considered

No response

Additional context

No response

[ereslibre]

👋 Thank you for your report!

It would be really great to run Wasm Workers Server in the browser! Wasm Workers Server at this time is a developer-focused tool that will look for Wasm Modules and supported languages extensions in the filesystem, and will serve these functions in HTTP endpoints created on the fly.

There are many ways in which we could map Wasm Workers Server to the browser, but we would like to understand your use case a bit better.

How do you expect to use Wasm Workers Server on the browser? Can you share some use cases with us, and how would you expect them to work?

Thank you :)

[chensce]

webcontain

[chensce]

shell.duckdb.org

[gedw99]

I am also interested in this.

here is my thinking and an basic example that someone else has done: https://github.com/stackus/todos-htmx-wasm

The bowsers have web workers and so we need a way for the main browser window to late load the wasm in the web worker and use Post Message as the “bus”.

So the main js makes a request to a wasm worker. The base system proxy ( service worker ) then requests the wasm ( not wasi ) from the server ( and caches it) and returns it to the web worker proxy. The web worker proxy executes the wasm and returns the result over Post Message to the js main window.

The next call will be much faster.

This combined with htmx pattern is very powerful because you can progressively render your gui merging in the html. So the wasm can not just return json to the main js but actual html.

The bus abstraction is the first thing needed so that you can use the architect for wasi and wasm.

[Angelmmiguel]

Sorry for the delay on the response, I missed the notification 🤦

This is an interesting proposal @gedw99, especially for web service applications. Wasm Workers Server provides the following logic on top of a WebAssembly runtime (Wasmtime):

1. HTTP Server
2. Routing logic
3. Build the Wasm + WASI context
4. Stdio
5. Mount folders
6. Add extra features:
7. WASI-NN
8. HTTP requests
9. K/V store
10. ...
11. Run the module + context

The 2, 3 and 5 steps are reproducible on a web worker environment. Unfortunately, the code is not portable, so it meas to recreate part of the logic in JavaScript. This logic could be split into independent crates that can be compiled to Wasm. Any of both approaches have different pros and cons.

However, the 4 step is more complex. Every feature requires certain APIs and resources, and some of them are not available in a browser context. We can mock it (like K/V), but in the future when wws offers a more complete and persistent K/V store the mock won't be enough.

For this reason, more than a web worker that captures all the routes automatically, I would start with a light runtime implementation that provides a basic set of features. You can instantiate it manually and reuse server workers, although you would need to call them explicitly.

Then, it can grow into a more complete and automated solution / proxy mode.

[gedw99]

https://wintercg.org/faq Is also designed for the goal of running your wasm in a browser or server.

as I understand it this repo is aligned with that goal too ?

[gedw99]

https://github.com/vmware-labs/wasm-workers-server/tree/main/kits/go/worker Uses stdIn / stdout so it makes the creation of the bus to run inside a browser easier but just creating a bus that can run in a browser too that abstracts away the Post Message implementation

[Angelmmiguel]

EDIT: I found I can convert an issue to discussion directly 🤦. Sorry for the noise!

---

Hello @gedw99, @ereslibre and @chensce!

Thank you for sharing all the links and ideas about running wws in the browser! This is an interesting idea and would love to continue discussing about it.

We recently enabled the "Discussions" section in the repository. I created a new "Idea" to continue the conversation there. I'll move the comments there, so don't worry about it!

#205