Comment by Groxx
17 days ago
Broadly enjoyed my read, though I do have a nitpick here:
>The absence of side effects or stalls cannot be enforced by the type system ...
Side effects is probably correct, but stalls would imply wasm code that calls out to a long-time blocking function - that's generally quite easy to type-system-ify, and wasm stuff often does so with promise-like constructs. So there would be a need for spacetimedb-side markers for "this func might do HTTP", but that kind of marker for WASM-contact-able code is very much a normal expectation.
If they don't have that kind of marker, and do allow blocking calls in their beta API, then yeah - huge problem with that kind of internal structure (shared global lock), completely agreed.
I would encourage you to read our technical write up in reply to this article: https://spacetimedb.com/blog/benchmarking
Doesn't really cover the types used in the beta APIs. Nor would I expect it to though.
Is there a more technical explanation post somewhere? I'm definitely curious how it works, and I like the core idea quite a bit - I'm fairly convinced that WASM uses like this are going to grow immensely, and "it's just a global mutex/single thread" reduces complexity so much that it's always interesting to see where it's possible to use.
The latency+throughout brings many questions though, like "are you holding responding to writes and any reads that occur after until changes are written to disk" and "if so I kinda assume that change log is constantly streamed to disk with a moving high water mark for responses". I can generally see how that'd hit such benchmarks, especially with non-dirty reads being near instant, but details are always interesting.
I don't really have a deep technical explanation blog post out, but we should definitely publish one.
I can say that your last paragraph is essentially correct though. It works exactly that way.
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