Saturday, 19th December 2020
Building a search engine for datasette.io
This week I added a search engine to datasette.io, using the search indexing tool I’ve been building for Dogsheep.
[... 1391 words]How Shopify Uses WebAssembly Outside of the Browser (via) I’m fascinated by applications of WebAssembly outside the browser. As a Python programmer I’m excited to see native code libraries getting compiled to WASM in a way that lets me call them from Python code via a bridge, but the other interesting application is executing untrusted code in a sandbox.
Shopify are doing exactly that—they are building a kind-of plugin mechanism where partner code compiled to WASM runs inside their architecture using Fastly’s Lucet. The performance numbers are in the same ballpark as native code.
Also interesting: they’re recommending AssemblyScript, a TypeScript-style language designed to compile directly to WASM without needing any additional interpreter support, as required by dynamic languages such as JavaScript, Python or Ruby. # 4:46 pm