Lunatic is an Erlang-inspired runtime for WebAssembly

After reading the Elixir implementation of X-Plane MMO backend (which appeared here yesterday, 1), I came across this: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;lumen&#x2F;lumen" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;lumen&#x2F;lumen</a>. It is an alternative BEAM implementation, designed for WebAssembly. I am personally learning Rust and I find it interesting that there are multiple BEAM (Erlang runtime) inspired implementations in Rust gaining traction.<p>1. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=27998323" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=27998323</a>

Thanks for posting this on a Friday, this is basically gonna be my weekend now. I love the idea of meshing a lightweight process framework with webassembly.

&gt; Lunatic builds on WebAssembly&#x27;s security. We all use unaudited third-party libs that get deployed with our code, Lunatic can use capability based security to limit them.<p>If they happen to load all dependencies into a giant blob of linear memory, C written extensions will take care of corrupting their runtime&#x27;s memory, regardless of WebAssembly &quot;security&quot;.

The big question that I did not see answered is does it support location transparency. One of the huge benefits of Erlang is that it is easy to take a process and move it to another machine or even another data center.<p>If Lunatic can do that, it would be a game changer for distributed computing.

As a complete layman in WebAssembly I always struggled to understand what are the use cases. I think what I don&#x27;t understand is what the _Web_ part exactly means, is a browse thing? Or could be used to more general use cases?

Tangential, but can WASM be used to run massive legacy C&#x2F;C++ codebases in a memory safe manner without slowing down too much? One example is iOS and Android messaging apps previously could parse messages that exploited the OS.

similar, so different angle <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;fluence.network&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;fluence.network&#x2F;</a> these have state full actors for public computing in wasm. if actor service dies, your deploy new one via pi calculus topology script

This sounds awesome!<p>How does messaging work between processes? What sort of overhead is involved?

Aside from some amount of inspiration, this seems to have nothing to do with Erlang. Kind of a gratuitous use of the name IMO.