[HN Gopher] Head in the Zed Cloud
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Head in the Zed Cloud
Author : todsacerdoti
Score : 45 points
Date : 2025-11-10 14:23 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (maxdeviant.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (maxdeviant.com)
| mariopt wrote:
| Been using CF Workers with JavaScript and I absolutely love it.
|
| What is performance overhead when comparing rust against wasm?
|
| Also think the time for a FOSS alternative is coming. Serverless
| without, virtually, cold starts is here to stay but being tied to
| only 1 vendor is problematic.
| wmf wrote:
| Workerd is already open source so that's a good start.
| kevincox wrote:
| It surely depends on your use case. Testing my Ricochet Robots
| solver (https://ricochetrobots.kevincox.ca/) which is pure
| computation with effectively no IO the speed is basically
| indistinguishable. Some runs the WASM is faster sometimes the
| native is faster. On average the native is definitely faster
| but it is surprisingly within the noise.
|
| Last time I compared (about 8 years ago) WASM was closer to
| double the runtime. So things have definitely improved. (I had
| to check a handful of times that I was compiling with the
| correct optimizations in both cases.)
| pmarreck wrote:
| The stats I've seen show a 10-20% loss in speed relative to
| natively-compiled, which is effectively noise for all but the
| most critical paths.
|
| It may get even closer with WASM3, released 2 months ago, since
| it has things like 64 bit address support, more flexible vector
| instructions, typed references (which remove runtime safety
| checks), basic GC, etc.
| https://webassembly.org/news/2025-09-17-wasm-3.0/
| laktek wrote:
| > Also think the time for a FOSS alternative is coming.
| Serverless without, virtually, cold starts is here to stay but
| being tied to only 1 vendor is problematic.
|
| Supabase Edge Functions runs on the same V8 isolate primitive
| as Cloudflare Workers and is fully open-source
| (https://github.com/supabase/edge-runtime). We use the Deno
| runtime, which supports Node built-in APIs, npm packages, and
| WebAssembly (WASM) modules. (disclaimer: I'm the lead for
| Supabase Edge Functions)
| tomComb wrote:
| Workers is a v8 isolates runtime like Deno. v8 and Deno are
| both open source and Deno is used in a variety of platforms,
| including Supabase and ValTown.
|
| It is a terrific technology, and it is reasonably portable but
| I think you would be better using it in something like Supabase
| where are the whole platform is open source and portable, if
| those are your goals.
| kentonv wrote:
| The Cloudflare Workers runtime is open source:
| https://github.com/cloudflare/workerd
|
| People can and do use this to run Workers on hosting providers
| other than Cloudflare.
| cedws wrote:
| Post is a bit sparse on details and seems to be more about the
| backend than the infra itself. Would be interested to hear more.
| pmarreck wrote:
| The choice to go to WebAssembly is an interesting one.
|
| WASM3, especially (released just 2 months ago), is really gunning
| for a more general-purpose "assembly for everywhere" status (not
| just "compile to web"), and it looks like it's accomplishing
| that.
|
| I hope they add some POSIXy stuff to it so I can write cross-
| platform commandline TUI's that do useful things without needing
| to be recompiled on different OS/chip combos (at the cost of a
| 10-20% reduction from native compilation- not a critical loss for
| all but the most important use-cases) and are likely to simply
| keep working on all future OS/chip combos (assuming you can run
| the wasm, of course)
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(page generated 2025-11-10 23:00 UTC)