Lucet is Fastly's native WebAssembly compiler and runtime. Using the Lucet runtime and Rust's wasm32-unknown-wasi target, we can create a WASM program that runs on the server.

At the time this blog post was written, the wasm32-unknown-wasi target is only available on Rust nightly. Make sure you are using a version of nightly that is as recent as April 1, 2019.

$ rustup update
info: syncing channel updates for 'stable-x86_64-apple-darwin'
info: syncing channel updates for 'nightly-x86_64-apple-darwin'
352.7 KiB / 352.7 KiB (100 %)  80.0 KiB/s ETA:   0 s
info: latest update on 2019-04-01, rust version 1.35.0-nightly (e3428db7c 2019-03-31)

Add the wasm32-unknown-wasi target using rustup:

$ rustup target add wasm32-unknown-wasi --toolchain nightly
info: downloading component 'rust-std' for 'wasm32-unknown-wasi'
 10.4 MiB /  10.4 MiB (100 %)   1.1 MiB/s ETA:   0 s
info: installing component 'rust-std' for 'wasm32-unknown-wasi'

Create a new binary, via Cargo and compile it to wasm32-unknown-wasi:

$ cargo init hello
     Created binary (application) package
$ cd hello/
$ cargo +nightly build --target wasm32-unknown-wasi
   Compiling hello v0.1.0 (/Users/herman/Code/hello)
    Finished dev [unoptimized + debuginfo] target(s) in 0.59s

We now have a hello.wasm file that supports WASI. The hello.wasm file will not run on its own though. We will use Fastly's Lucet runtime to get our program running. I created a Docker container with Lucet already built at https://hub.docker.com/r/hjr3/lucet. I wrote a blog post on this if you want more details. Use the hjr3/lucet container to build native x86_64 code from our WASM file and then run it using the Lucet runtime:

$ docker run --rm -it -v "$(pwd)":/usr/local/src hjr3/lucet lucetc-wasi -o hello.so target/wasm32-unknown-wasi/debug/hello.wasm
$ docker run --rm -it -v "$(pwd)":/usr/local/src hjr3/lucet lucet-wasi hello.so
Hello, world!

One neat thing about this example is our local development operating system does not have to match our target runtime operating system. We can compile our Rust program locally on MacOS and only use the hjr3/lucet docker container (which runs Ubuntu Xenial) to convert/run the program.

WASI is brand new and a lot of development is still going on. From the Rust PR that added support for the wasm32-unknown-wasi target:

The wasi target in libstd is still somewhat bare bones. This PR does not fill out the filesystem, networking, threads, etc. Instead it only provides the most basic of integration with the wasi syscalls...

I plan on demonstrating more examples as libstd gets built out.