Lunatic
Languages and libraries
actor runtime
SHOW HN2020
141points
47comments
#433of 3,028 in 2020
Top 15%of 2020 by points
How HN took it
LovedMost comments that take a side are positive
7 positive, 13 neutral or asking, 1 mixed, 1 critical, out of 22 comments about the project. Thread score +0.24.
Idea: 7 for, 1 against
The thread, comment by comment
Each row is a top-level comment and its replies, in HN's order. Select a cell to open that comment on HN.
positive neutral or mixed critical about another commenter or something else the maker
What HN said
What people liked
Actor-per-wasm-instance design seen as a promising alternative to microservices
From 3 comments
Erlang/OTP inspired actor systems that run Webassembly code are a brilliant (and potentially way superior) alternative to microservice madness. Until now adopting Erlang or Akka…
the_duke on HN> OTP inspired actor systems that run Webassembly code are a brilliant (and potentially way superior) alternative to microservice madness I very much agree with this. While Actor…
Snitch-Thursday on HNThis is the way forward. A wasm-instance-per-actor architecture enables: - Actor prioritization - Actor pausing - Killing actors at arbitrary points - Actor serialization /…
nahuel0x on HN
Fits well with Erlang/OTP ideas like supervision and isolation
From 2 comments
It's more about fine grained control of errors. WASM/Lunatic could bring many of the benefits of Erlang application design to any wasm friendly language. The creator of Elixir…
elcritch on HNThis is the way forward. A wasm-instance-per-actor architecture enables: - Actor prioritization - Actor pausing - Killing actors at arbitrary points - Actor serialization /…
nahuel0x on HN
Objections
Unclear whether WASM actors remove the need for containers and orchestration
From 2 comments
> All while avoiding the complexities of grpc, building Docker images, Kubernetes, service meshes, "serverless" frameworks, I don't think this will happen to be honest. The WASM…
justsomeuser on HNIt seems I've been in my "ignore all new tech stuff" hole for too long when I open a project link and don't understand most of the value/code. It seems very interesting though, I…
bird_monster on HN
Actor concept and examples were hard to understand from the README
From 1 comment
Thanks, because from the github page I had no idea what "Actor" meant, though I was interested to know more. Reading the code sample did not give me any better idea what was…
uglycoyote on HN
Examples look more like channels (CSP) than mailbox actors
From 1 comment
Fantastic project! The ability to transform serial compiled languages to run atop an async engine is great. The examples, though, remind me more of Go routines and CSP rather…
elcritch on HN
Requests
Shared buffers for passing data between actors without copying
From 2 comments
Nice work! How do you pass complex objects between actors in Lunatic? Do you have to pass a byte array, or is there a more sophisticated approach where you don't have to…
octopoc on HNThanks! Currently the heaps and stacks of each actor are completely separate and it's impossible to pass anything without copying it. In the future I would like to add an option…
bkolobara on HN
Binary message formats such as MessagePack or CBOR
From 1 comment
Fantastic project! The ability to transform serial compiled languages to run atop an async engine is great. The examples, though, remind me more of Go routines and CSP rather…
elcritch on HN
Supervision trees and process linking
From 1 comment
Fantastic project! The ability to transform serial compiled languages to run atop an async engine is great. The examples, though, remind me more of Go routines and CSP rather…
elcritch on HN
Questions
Memory overhead per actor compared with Erlang processes
From 3 comments
just a question: how much memory a wasm process in lunatic consumes as minimum?
nahuel0x on HN> Has the potential to be better than Erlang what's the overhead of a wasm instance?
dnautics on HNWhat about Erlang? 4k sound like not that much to me? Imagine a server with 1M concurrent connections, could it need just 4G? (Plus lots of overheard. And without heap)
cutemonster on HN
How it compares with actix and Go channels
From 2 comments
Any comparison with actix(-web)? I know the latest version of actix-web doesn't use the actor model, but actix itself still does.
cercatrova on HNhow does this compare to other "green thread" approaches? Like go channel?
nsonha on HN
Alternatives named
wascc
From 1 comment
Erlang/OTP inspired actor systems that run Webassembly code are a brilliant (and potentially way superior) alternative to microservice madness. Until now adopting Erlang or Akka…
the_duke on HN
Bastion
From 1 comment
See also, Bastion: Highly-available distributed fault-tolerant runtime in Rust https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22403713
ignoramous on HN
Erlang/OTP and Elixir
From 2 comments
> single language ecosystem The BEAM supports at least 20 languages.
macintux on HNAll of which are tiny niche languages, except Elixir... I actually think think BEAM gaining the ability to run WASM would be a smart development. It would make using high…
the_duke on HN
Akka
From 1 comment
> Until now adopting Erlang or Akka meant restricting yourself to a single language ecosystem, "Erlang" itself is a single language, but the BEAM/OTP ecosystem isn't usable only…
dragonwriter on HN
Orleans
From 1 comment
Have you seen Orleans? https://github.com/dotnet/orleans
reubenbond on HN