We are excited to announce SingleStore is now a member of the Bytecode Alliance!
Have you heard of WebAssembly? Called Wasm for short, the assembly-like language was initially designed to allow code not originally written for browsers to run safely and performantly on the web. Today, WebAssembly is a bit of a misnomer: it is neither Web nor Assembly.
In recent years, Wasm has emerged as a powerful technology to deploy software anywhere, including browsers. Think of Wasm as a common compile target for many programming languages that allows modules to run in a safe — because it’s sandboxed — portable and performant environment; whether written in Rust, C, C++ or Python, whether deployed in the browser, on an edge device, in a managed service or … wait for it, a database.
“The key change required to handle large data is to push the compute to the data. WASM allows you to move the compute inside the database, which can dramatically change how databases and analytical systems interact. It is going to open up all sorts of opportunities to simplify analytics, make them faster and more interactive, and lower TCO.” - Jordan Tigani, Chief Product Officer at SingleStore
At SingleStore, we believe this technology is foundational and transformational. Extending the capabilities of a database by safely running code written in many languages as close to the data as possible is just one of many ways we believe Wasm will make a big difference. Check out the live demo of Wasm as a user-defined function that I ran last summer as part of our Innovation Center opening in Raleigh, NC.
SingleStore is dedicating significant resources toward building out Wasm technology and we are excited to announce our membership in the Bytecode Alliance, a vendor-neutral nonprofit organization whose mission is to create a powerful, secure and simplified software development platform based on WebAssembly (Wasm) and WebAssembly System Interface (WASI) standards.
“SingleStore is a fantastic contributor to the WebAssembly ecosystem and standardization process: their work on projects like the WASI port of Python and the underlying WASIX, and the WASI-data proposal opens up entirely new use cases for WebAssembley. I’m incredibly happy to welcome SingleStore to the Bytecode Alliance, and look forward to collaborating even more closely.” – Till Schneidereit, Chair & Co-Founder of the Bytecode Alliance
For an excellent overview, see Lin Clark's blog post announcing the Bytecode Alliance and introduction to nanoprocesses.
The platform that the Bytecode Alliance is committed to building will allow applications and service providers to confidently run untrusted code on any infrastructure (like a database 😉). Through the Bytecode Alliance, we will help provide state-of-the-art foundations for Wasm where security, efficiency, modularity and portability are our guiding principles.
We will also be participating in growing the open standards created by the W3C WebAssembly Community Group and WASI subgroup. Innovation in this area, especially around fine-grained sandboxing and capabilities-based security, is of particular interest to us and our applications within SingleStore.
Even before joining the Bytecode Alliance, SingleStore was engaged with several Bytecode Alliance projects. If you're interested in checking out some of our favorites, see:
- https://github.com/bytecodealliance/wit-bindgen
- https://github.com/bytecodealliance/wasmtime
- https://github.com/bytecodealliance/wasmtime-py
- https://github.com/bytecodealliance/wasi-nn
“I am superbly excited about WebAssembly technology and about being part of this fast-moving ecosystem. Whatever use case brings you to Wasm, you quickly see new applications and opportunities. Wasm increases our rate of innovation and I am looking forward to passing that on to our customers.” - Oliver Schabenberger, Chief Innovation Officer
Visit the Bytecode Alliance website for more information about current members and projects, as well as how to become a member, and follow the Alliance on Twitter at @bytecodeallies.
