| Since it sounds like very few folks in this thread have actually fired up Spin and built a thing, I thought I might offer a few observations based on my experience working on a little app over the last 2-3 weeks. First, the good stuff: - As a Rust developer, the SDK tooling is really good. I went from running the installer to generating a templated app to dropping in my own app logic in about 15 minutes. - Local development iteration is also very fast and low-friction. Building everything as small WASM components means you effectively get hot module reloading for free, without needing to shim in a bunch of extra dev-mode-only code loading logic (with all the inherent incompatibilities and heisenbugs) - The component reuse model feels a lot easier for me to reason than interminable chains of Express middleware (YMMV, of course) - You get actual static (WASM) binaries, which can be as small as your compiler makes them. I'm normally pretty thrilled to get a production app container down to <100MB, and the app I've been working on, even without really paying any attention to my dependency graph, is around 2MB. Storage may be cheap, but pulling ~GBs of new container layers for a given release or deployment isn't free or instantaneous. There are some less-great things: - The "outbound" DB adapters are _very_ bare-bones. You only have access to a small list of datatypes, and you can't really layer higher-level libraries on top b/c the APIs aren't compatible with standard backend drivers. (Furthermore, if you want to use e.g. MongoDB, Clickhouse, Dynamo, etc., etc.: sorry, I hope you have some sort of HTTP adapter lying around ready to use.) - WIT (WebAssembly Interface Types) is a cool _emerging_ standard, but like a lot of WAS* community stuff it's still in a fractured "draft" state, and many of the actual interfaces exposed in Spin are unique to their runtime. (This also means that _extending_ something like the PG bindings requires a ton of indirection code spelunking; I gave up trying to add a few new native types after realizing I would also have to support them for MySQL and every other backend DB.) - The development environment, while relatively complete and usable on its own, doesn't really play nice with Nix or other high-level dev environment tooling. (There are literally invocations of `rustup` inside the top-level `build.rs` for the project, so good luck providing your own paths for e.g. `rustc`.) On balance, I'm enjoying the experience thus far and starting to think about more thing-ish was to apply the tools. I'm also looking forward to trying out more of the self-hosted infrastructure stack. I'm not opposed to paying for managed hosting, but I do occasionally build things that need to run in "offline" or air-gapped environments, so being able to bring up a full hosting environment is pretty clutch. |