tokera's comments

> Why don't you respond to their argument

I did

> But Wasmer Edge does not run close to most customers and does not run on their browser.

It does run in the browser, that is what https://wasmer.sh uses to launch things published via the `wasmer publish` command. There are more plans to integrate these closer together into a hybrid system in the future with converged networking and transparent offloading work to servers, needs more work but its for sure possible with this foundation.

> I think Edge is something where a limited pilot makes no sense.

One does not just hit a button and servers appear everywhere in the world at once for free, all CDN's do the same thing, they run in racks of servwrs and expand their POP's based off real data and not just guess work. For instance, apparently Japan has a massive interest in WASIX, so perhaps the next POP should go there. Its also worth mentioning that if Wasmer Edge had been built on top of someone elses Edge (as others have done) then they would never be able to offer the cheap pricing.

> I think Edge is something where a limited pilot makes no sense.

It is a good point you make here about perception versus alpha relaity but with the architecture of the design and the huge amount of interest coming from the community the locations will expand quickly so it will be a growing pain of history fairly quickly.

> I don't see how wasm will significantly help you get more servers closer to users than existing companies in this space

No other company I am aware of are trying to build a distributed computer that lets developers write a program that runs in a hybrid setup of running in the literal browser of the user and connected to high performance compute in data centres. Honestly this is the bit that really excites me, imagine a program that runs in the browser but has real threads that also run in a data center. Exciting times.

"Edge" refers to the fact the workload runs close to the customer either a few network hops away or on their browser.

In traditional Cloud Computing the customer must "select" where it runs (i.e. pick a data centre or region) - for instance, when you go in the Azure portal for many services like AKS you must select where it is hosted. In Edge computing you don't need to do this as it automatically serves the request at the closest "pop" (point of presence), this is also how Wasmer Edge works.

Wasmer Edge are in an alpha release phase thus the edge network is kept purposely limited in this early pilot to take a careful approach to its expansion.

Wasmer also have plans to build a hybrid environment between the browser itself and the edge network which will unlock some really exciting use cases thanks to WASIX.

Ignore the troll reply... he is paid (or just sells himself for free) by the competition to discredit... just downvote him.

glad you like my sock(et) work indeed

https://github.com/john-sharratt/wasix-witx/commit/3b1469687...

now I know its hard to imagine someone other than your personal boogeyman contributing value to the open source world, but there is a real need for me to keep my coding skills up to scratch and it just so happens that `wasmer.io` are the coolest kids in WASM town right now, so I'll share my spare time with them thanks.

Twitter Community Notes:

* WASIX does not allow one to open a random file in the host environment, in fact WASIX changed absolutely nothing in file system ABI's at all from preview1 - it just added other extensions.

* WASIX has not removed the capabilities model and instead extended it to support Berkley sockets - i.e. there are capabilities defined for the new socket operations.

* WASIX is fully sandboxed, meaning the network is completely virtual and can be restricted as much as one likes

* TTY and forking is also fully sandboxed.

* You can't reject the Internet

i coded the WASIX fork syscall, so I understand all this (f.y.i. I much prefer rust to C as its got a much better designed threading system).

what you must realize is that one does not have to use a syscall if they don't like it in (e.g. just use rust to code your app and it will never call the fork syscall)... but taking that choice away from others who want to use it is unfair as its denying them access to the WASM ecosystem (e.g. bash)

i dont think Linus intended his operating system code to land rocket ships on barges either but hey... we can forgive him.

its only nonsense from ones perspective... from another perspective it makes a lot of sense - if one wants to create a fully sandboxed browser terminal (benefits of which are huge). then compiling bash to WASM goes a long way as who wants to rewrite all that terminal code anyway?

https://wasmer.sh/

rust compiles to WASM as-well without those flaws. the fact one even has a choice is the whole point

preview2 still need these to be added:

- full Berkley socket support

- sub-process spawning, waiting

- forking

- TTY support

- pipes

- event streams

- DNS resolving

- longjmp/setjmp

without these we can't compile our favorite apps in our favorite languages

lets help get these into preview2 so that WASIX is not needed anymore but until then the community needs an interim solution that has long term support - that is WASIX's complimentary goal.

(WASIX insider)

lets reflect on this - if this was done as pull requests to `preview1` then would it have been accepted?... it would have received rejection comments around even the idea of these particular POSIX compatible syscalls.

WASIX should be seen as a preview 1.5 rather than something new, just extensions to WASI that add the missing bits that are badly needed today to actual compile useful apps from various code bases.

at a minimum this is an interim solution so that app developers can just start compiling their code bases into WASM and we can all get moving forward together - no one wants a fork here.

of course the WASI maintainers are reading all this and hopefully this will be a wake up call to add these missing syscalls as a priority also into preview2 so everyone benefits - then WASIX can die and its purpose is served... but until then WASIX will get long term support so the community can proceed literally today onwards.