Wasmer’s first Postgres extension to run WebAssembly is here!

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Wasmer, the WebAssembly runtime have been successfully embedded in many languages like Rust, Python, Ruby, PHP, and Go. Yesterday, Ivan Enderlin, a PhD Computer Scientist at Wasmer, announced new Postgres extension version 0.1 for WebAssembly. Since the project is still under heavy development, the extension only supports integers (on 32- and 64-bits) and works on Postgres 10 only. It also does not support strings, records, views or any other Postgres types yet.

The official post states, “The goal is to gather a community and to design a pragmatic API together, discover the expectations, how developers would use this new technology inside a database engine.”

The Postgres extension provides two foreign data wrappers wasm.instances and wasm.exported_functions in the wasm foreign schema. The wasm.instances is a table with an id and wasm_file columns. The wasm.exported_functions is a table with the instance_id, name, inputs, and outputs columns. Enderlin says that these information are enough for the wasm Postgres extension “to generate the SQL function to call the WebAssembly exported functions.”

The Wasmer team ran a basic benchmark of computing the Fibonacci sequence computation to compare the execution time between WebAssembly and PL/pgSQL. The benchmark was run on a MacBook Pro 15″ from 2016, 2.9Ghz Core i7 with 16Gb of memory.

Image Source: Wasmer

The result was that, “Postgres WebAssembly extension is faster to run numeric computations. The WebAssembly approach scales pretty well compared to the PL/pgSQL approach, in this situation.”

The Wasmer team believes that though it is too soon to consider WebAssembly as an alternative to PL/pgSQL, the above result makes them hopeful that it can be explored more.

To know more about Postgres extension, check out its Github page.