Rust, WebAssembly, and the future of Serverless (DevFest 2019)

Steve Klabnik (@SteveKlabnik) discusses the Rust programming language, WebAssembly program, and the future of Serverless during this talk.
DevFest 2019 → goo.gle/372VJ69
Subscribe to Google Developer Groups → goo.gle/GDevGroups event: DevFest 2019; re_ty: Publish; fullname: Steve Klabnik;

[@guywald1]

Steve is one of the best speakers, honestly. Pretty exciting stuff. Really hoping for WASI to take off!

[@julienariel187]

i guess im asking the wrong place but does any of you know a tool to get back into an Instagram account? I stupidly lost the account password. I would love any help you can give me

[@andrealmar04]

Amazing talk!!!

[@user-bm5om6io1l]

Thanks for all Steve!

[@elarous]

a good and fun talk

[@TheMrKeksLp]

Not sure I agree that WASM is the "future of (server) computing" but definitely exited for it's future in the browser!

[@jaysistar2711]

Actually fulfilling the promise of Java with any language? ... We have ARM64 servers. The powerbill is 20% of the AMD64. RISC-V is promising to provide even better power savings at the same performance level (or higher performance at the same power level). You can use BuildKit in Docker to make it work for everything, but in our case, we'd be building everything twice, and maybe 3 times if we haven't replaced all of our AMD machines when we start getting RISC-V servers. Please get on board with this move. The more that everybody is satisfied with status quo, the longer our power bills will remain high. I want to hire more programmers, not machines.

[@GodOfMacro]

24:18 -> [INAUDIBLE] was actually the name of the author of wasm-pack, ashleygwilliams

[@ilovetech8341]

I love rust. I went from C to PHP to Rails to Node to Rust.

[@AndriiMuliar]

hobby?

[@ppgab]

I thought he would be talking about running server code in the browser, great talk nonetheless!

[@carlosjosejimenezbermudez9255]

Due to the nature of the browser that is probably never happening. There's tradeoffs when you go web vs desktop or mobile, one of the main ones is security. You give up security and gain ease of use. Security in a desktop app or even a mobile native app is fairly simple because you have access to the OS to secure things better. Having a string connection in everybody's browser and having it be secure without someone exploiting your app all the way to unusability is really hard. Having a secure string connection in a desktop app is pretty simple. I used connection strings as an example, but really it applies to any application secrets that may be required for your app to work.

[@jaysistar2711]

Not in this talk specifically, but still about WASM: I'm excited about WAGI! It will bring back simplicity. I am wondering the impact on our Tonic based gRPC servers, though. How will they handle streaming? We may just start moving our APIs to raw REST-like flatbuffers instead of JSON, and use SSE for streaming notifications.

[@edo386]

Qt QML for wasm is about 20MB+ uncompressed, I feel you there about compiling the runtime and shipping it...

[@Rakesh6720]

Wasi is an API implementations of web assembly can implement to set boundaries if what can break out of the container...which is the browser...which is the operating system. 🤯

[@yashashav_dk3766]

Isn't that awesome!?

[@JubliMitra]

❤️💛💙💚

[@wanxiangxing4542]

there is a typo: in the fibonacci function the if condition must if(n

[@tomekkarwowski4597]

Not if you start from 0. fib(0)=1, fib(1)=1 and so on.

[@PetrGladkikh]

34:17 or it is the same idea as of Java VM if you look at it the right way :)

[@scriber36]

Although the JVM does not have value types (project Valhalla takes forever) (nor support for implementing pointers) and it does Garbage Collection (which was a great buzz at the time). WASM on the other hand is more "raw" than JVM Bytecode (both being virtual assembly essentially) and so allows for code running closer to the metal without extra care from the runtime. I agree, the concept is that same, but the potential of WASM/WASI is greater, which we already see as C/C++/Rust already have WASM as compilation target. What the JVM does additionally is OS-agnostic system interface (for file system, etc.), which role gets fulfilled by browsers for WASM I think, then by WASI. I'm primarily a Java dev, Java will always have its place in my heart as a great pioneer, but at the same time I'm super excited about WASM and WASI :) Let's see how it turns out!

[@erlangparasu6339]

rustaceans everywhere 👍

[@akintomiwaopemipo6170]

I can't wait to see rust++ - Real object orientation.

[@willinton06]

Rust# will be next, the RustScript with dynamic types just because and then TrustScript which is RustScript with static types!

[@zakariamansouri1157]

@@willinton06 lol

[@Daniel_Zhu_a6f]

I'm not a programmer, but when i started programming as a hobby, i've noticed that thing: browsers really are like operating systems. The question is, why browsers haven't emerged as an OS part in the first place? why nobody have merged them later?

[@Daniel_Zhu_a6f]

@@PeerReynders thank you) this was really interesting

[@ryanleemartin7758]

Well, browsers evolved into this state of "an OS like" platform. They began life to display simple documents that could be linked to other documents across "the web". That was about it. Awesome and ground breaking idea but simple. The "browser is an OS" was a transformation over many years. When java came along, the mindset from documents in a browser to using browsers as a platform for applications started to take hold. Java failed in the browser but the idea of writing applications in a web browser remained, that resulted in javascript becoming a real language that was fast enough to begin building web applications and not just web sites. Then people got to thinking that javascript isn't good enough and wouldn't it be great if other languages could run in a browser too? And here we are today. I'm leaving out details but that's the journey. It was an idea that had to evolve, it could not be created from the beginning.

[@VivekYadav-ds8oz]

Well chrome OS is a thing.

[@Mladjooo]

8:30 just initialize let mut y: i32 = 0;

[@ekremdincel1505]

Just don't use the y.

[@ferkozhaluva298]

so... what on earth is this "shenanigan" buzzword?

[@chrisbodley8958]

"Rust++" now it has a garbage collector lol

[@ilpojaaskelainen1552]

Actually, I'm also trying to delete my accounts on gmail, google, and rest... help?

[@williampeddigree5215]

7

[@VivekYadav-ds8oz]

I like Rust, but if WASM remains as a Rust thing, it defeats the whole purpose of it doesn't it? WASM was invented to get multiple languages compile down to the same environment. If WASM = Rust, the effort was in vain.

[@abowden556]

It's not just a rust thing, rust are just the people most dedicated to supporting it.

[@VivekYadav-ds8oz]

I'm not blaming the Rust people, I'm blaming other language communities for not stepping up their game.

[@ilpojaaskelainen1552]

There is no WEB assembly.

[@carlosjosejimenezbermudez9255]

There is web assembly and it existed in firefox since 2018... Chrome and edge followed soon after.