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by WORMS_EAT_WORMS 1915 days ago
Great post, enjoyed your writing style and drawings a ton!

One of the bigger things I think Workers have going for it versus others is it’s ability to bind WASM modules. Hyper efficient, basically native running computation at edge is a really cool concept. Especially since you can talk to it with a dead-simple JavaScript API.

For example, Cloudflare charges a good amount of money for image resizing using their CDN however they do it. At the same time, they also have this proof of concept worker that uses Web Assembly to do it for basically free! [1]

Another cool demo that was on HN the other day was embedding SQLite with WASM for edge quick transactions. [2]

Completely mind blowing... Still, very few demos in the wild. The learning curve is a beast and hopefully gets better as Rust and WASM become more mainstream for web developers.

[1] https://github.com/cloudflare/cloudflare-workers-wasm-demo

[2] https://github.com/lspgn/edge-sql

2 comments

Wow, thanks for the insight and ideas! Agree, having native running runtime at edge can can give a start to some interesting projects
> basically native running computation at edge is a really cool concept

What are some real world use cases for this? I'm surprised the Cloudflare product team is prioritizing working on WASM module support instead of like... querying from a database through a way other than `fetch()`.