Wasmcloud Progress Post (#100)

* blog: first wasmcloud post

* blog/wasmcloud-progress: center image

blog/wasmcloud-progress-2019-12-08.markdown

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+---
+title: "Wasmcloud Progress: Hello, World!"
+date: 2019-12-08
+series: olin
+tags:
+ - wasm
+ - faas
+---
+
+# Wasmcloud Progress: Hello, World!
+
+I have been working off and on over the years and have finally created the base
+of a functions as a service backend for [WebAssembly][wasm] code. I'm code-naming this
+wasmcloud. [Wasmcloud][wasmcloud] is a pre-alpha prototype and is currently very much work in
+progress. However, it's far enough along that I would like to explain what I
+have been doing for the last few years and what it's all built up to.
+
+Here is a high level view of all of the parts that make up wasmcloud and how
+they correlate:
+
+![wasmcloud graphviz dependency map](/static/blog/wasmcloud-grid.png)
+
+## Land: The Beginning
+
+A little bit after I found WebAssembly I started to play with it. It seemed like
+it was too good to be true. A completely free and open source VM format that
+would run on almost any platform? Sounds like the kind of black magick
+witchcraft you hear about on Star Trek.
+
+However, I kept at it and continued experimenting. I eventually came up with
+[Land][land]. This was a very simple thing and was really used to help me invent
+Dagger.
+
+Dagger was an attempt at an incredible amount of minimalism. I based it on an
+extreme interpretation of the Unix philosophy (everything is a file ->
+everything is a bytestream) combined with some Plan 9 for flavor. It had only 5
+system calls:
+
+- `open()` - opens a stream by URL, returning a stream descriptor
+- `close()` - closes a stream descriptor
+- `read()` - reads from a stream
+- `write()` - writes to a stream
+- `flush()` - flushes intermediate data and turns async behavior into syncronous
+  behavior
+  
+And yet this was enough to implement a HTTP client.
+
+The core guiding idea was that a cloud-native OS API should expose internet
+resources as easily as it exposes native resources. It should be as easy to use
+WebSockets as it is to use normal sockets. Additionally, all of the details
+should be abstracted away from the WebAssembly module. DNS resolution is not its
+job. TLS configuration is not its job. Its job is to run your code. Everything
+else should just be provided by the system.
+
+I wrote a
+[blogpost](https://christine.website/blog/land-1-syscalls-file-io-2018-06-18)
+about this work and even did a 
+[talk at GoCon
+Canada](https://christine.website/talks/webassembly-on-the-server-system-calls-2019-05-31)
+about it.
+
+And this worked for several months as I learned WebAssembly and started to
+experiment with bigger and better things.
+
+## Olin: Phase 2
+
+Land taught me a lot. I started to quickly run into the limits of Dagger though.
+I ended up needing calls like non-cryptographic entropy, environment variables,
+command-line arguments and getting the current time. After doing some research
+(and trying/failing to implement my own such API based on [newlib][newlib]) I
+found a library and specification called [CommonWA][cwa]. This claimed to offer
+a lot of what I was looking for. Namely URLs as filenames and all of the host
+interop support I could hope for. I named this platform Olin, or the One
+Language Intelligent Network.
+
+However the specification was somewhat dead. The author of it had largely moved
+on to more ferrous pastures and I became one of the few users of it. I ended up
+[forking the specification][olincwa] and implementing my view of what it should
+be.
+
+I ended up implementing a [Rust implementation][olincwarust] of the guest ->
+host API for the Webassembly side of things. I forked some of the existing Rust
+code for this and gradually started adding more and more things. The [test
+harness][olintests] is the biggest wasm program I've written for a while.
+Seriously, there's a lot going on there. It tests every single function exposed
+in the CWA spec as well as all of the schemes I had implemented. 
+
+Over time I ended up testing Olin in more and more places and on more and more
+hardware. As a side effect of all of this being pure go, it was very easy to
+cross compile for PowerPC, 32 bit arm (including a $9 arm board that lives under
+my desk) and even other targets that gccgo supports. I even ended up porting
+[part of TempleOS to Olin][olintempleos] as a proof of concept, but have more
+plans in the future for porting other parts of its kernel as a way to help
+people understand low-level operating system development.
+
+I've even written a few blogposts about Olin:
+
+- [Olin: Why](https://christine.website/blog/olin-1-why-09-1-2018)
+- [Olin: The Future](https://christine.website/blog/olin-2-the-future-09-5-2018)
+
+But, this was great for running stuff interactively and via the command line. It
+left me wanting more. I wanted to have that mythical functions as a service
+backend that I've been dreaming of. So, I created [wasmcloud][wasmcloud].
+
+## h
+
+As an interlude, I also created the [h programming language][hlang] during this
+time as a satirical parody of [V][vlang]. This ended up helping me test a lot of
+the core functionality that I had built up with Olin. Here's an example of a
+program in h:
+
+```
+h
+```
+
+And this compiles to:
+
+```
+(module
+ (import "h" "h" (func $h (param i32)))
+ (func $h_main
+       (local i32 i32 i32)
+       (local.set 0 (i32.const 10))
+       (local.set 1 (i32.const 104))
+       (local.set 2 (i32.const 39))
+       (call $h (get_local 1))
+       (call $h (get_local 0))
+ )
+ (export "h" (func $h_main))
+)
+```
+
+This ends up printing:
+
+```
+h
+```
+
+I think this is the smallest (if not one of the smallest) quine generator in the
+world. I even got this program running on bare metal:
+
+<center>![](/static/blog/xeos_h.png)</center>
+
+[hlang]: https://h.christine.website
+[vlang]: https://vlang.io
+
+## Wasmcloud
+
+[Wasmcloud][wasmcloud] is the culmination of all of this work. The goal of
+wasmcloud is to create a functions as a service backend for running people's
+code in an isolated server-side environment.
+
+Users can use the `wasmcloud` command line tool to do everything at the moment:
+
+```
+$ wasmcloud
+Usage: wasmcloud <flags> <subcommand> <subcommand args>
+
+Subcommands:
+        commands         list all command names
+        flags            describe all known top-level flags
+        help             describe subcommands and their syntax
+
+Subcommands for api:
+        login            logs into wasmcloud
+        whoami           show information about currently logged in user
+
+Subcommands for handlers:
+        create           create a new handler
+        logs             shows logs for a handler
+
+Subcommands for utils:
+        namegen          show information about currently logged in user
+        run              run a webassembly file with the same environment as production servers
+
+
+Top-level flags (use "wasmcloud flags" for a full list):
+  -api-server=http://wasmcloud.kahless.cetacean.club:3002: default API server
+  -config=/home/cadey/.wasmc.json: default config location
+```
+
+This tool lets you do a few basic things:
+
+- Authenticate with the wasmcloud server
+- Create handlers from WebAssembly files that meet the CommonWA API as realized
+  by Olin
+- Get logs for individual handler invocations
+- Run WebAssembly modules locally like they would get run on wasmcloud
+
+Nearly all of the complexity is abstracted away from users as much as possible.
+
+## Future Steps
+
+In the future I hope to do the following things:
+
+- Support updating handlers to new versions of the code
+- Support live-streaming of logs
+- Support handler deletion
+- Support bulk queue export
+- Support [wasi](https://wasi.dev) for easier interoperability
+- Support more resource types such as websockets
+- Investigate porting the wasmcloud executor to Rust
+- Documentation/a book on how to use wasmcloud
+- Create an easier way to create accounts that can make handlers
+- Deploy to production somewhere
+
+## GReeTZ
+
+Every single one of these people was immesurably helpful in this research over
+the years.
+
+- A. Wilcox
+- acln
+- as
+- bb010g
+- [dalias](https://twitter.com/RichFelker)
+- [jaddr2line](https://twitter.com/jaddr2line)
+- [neelance](https://github.com/neelance)
+
+And many more I can't remember because it's been so many.
+
+---
+
+If you want to support my work, please do so via
+[Patreon](https://patreon.com/cadey). It really means a lot to me and helps to
+keep the dream alive!
+
+[wasm]: https://webassembly.org
+[land]: http://tulpa.dev/cadey/land
+[newlib]: https://wiki.osdev.org/Porting_Newlib
+[cwa]: https://github.com/CommonWA
+[olincwarust]: https://github.com/Xe/olin/tree/master/cwa/olin
+[olincwatest]: https://github.com/Xe/olin/blob/master/cwa/tests/src/main.rs
+[olintempleos]: https://christine.website/blog/templeos-2-god-the-rng-2019-05-30
+[wasmcloud]: https://tulpa.dev/within/wasmcloud