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by electroly 1520 days ago
> a fraction of the overhead of a container

I mean, only in theory or when looking at it from the right angle, right? Or are you only comparing against JavaScript (unclear)? WASM is still much slower than native code. Containers spend most of their time executing native code; the "overhead" of containers is at the boundaries and is minor compared to the slowdown by moving from native code to WASM. In the future WASM may approach native performance, but it's not there now. I'm 100% certain that transitioning my native-code-in-containers workloads to WASM would be slower, not faster.
1 comments
teleclimber 1520 days ago
Edge functions are typically run intermittently, with their runtime stopped to free up resources between runs. Therefore a big factor is startup and shutdown speed. Containers are pretty bad there. Deno is better, and WASM is unbeatable, especially with things like Wizer[0].

[0]https://github.com/bytecodealliance/wizer

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lucacasonato 1520 days ago
Deno can in theory do the pre-initialization that wizer does for JS too. We have all of the infrastructure for it, we just have not gotten around to actually implementing it yet.
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teleclimber 1520 days ago
Issue 3335. I know. I'm watching it. :))
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electroly 1520 days ago
Makes sense when talking about edge functions, but then OP started talking about Kubernetes. Our Kubernetes workloads don't resemble that at all; there's virtually none of that container startup/shutdown overhead to be concerned about. Most weeks, no containers are started or stopped at all.
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