Cloud Native Computing Foundation Cloud Native Wasm Day North America 2021, 30 Oct 2021

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From YouTube: Lightning Talk: Grain: WebAssembly Development Made - Oscar Spencer, Grain

Description

Don’t miss out! Join us at our next event: KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2022 in Valencia, Spain from May 17-20. Learn more at https://kubecon.io The conference features presentations from developers and end users of Kubernetes, Prometheus, Envoy, and all of the other CNCF-hosted projects.

Lightning Talk: Grain: WebAssembly Development Made - Oscar Spencer, Grain

As WebAssembly takes the cloud computing world by storm, having good tools to work with is more important than ever. While a variety of languages treat WebAssembly as just another compiler target, Grain is one of the first languages built from the ground up to work with WebAssembly exclusively—without sacrificing features you know and love from other web languages, such as closures, pattern matching, garbage collection, and custom types. WebAssembly is a perfect choice for applications that need to be small and performant—Grain is suitable for edge computing, smart contracts, and so much more.

A

All right, my name is oscar spencer. I'm the core team lead for the grain programming language and this presentation is grain. Webassembly development made easy. So what is grain? It's a brand new programming language designed exclusively for webassembly. We don't target x86, no other platforms, it's just for webassembly. That's our only focus and we want to make webassembly great for developers so some overview of the language. It's strongly typed. That means when you write your grain code.

A

You know that when that program is compiled, you're not going to get any type error at runtime, you can have confidence that your code is going to work. It's functional programming oriented. So these days we've seen everyone loving all their different functional programming concepts. We have all of that in grade, but it's flexible for all sorts of programming. Styles. Sometimes you don't want to write that recursive function. Sometimes you just want to write that for loop. You just want to mutate that variable. We make sure that you can do that and we've got modern day.

A

Language features just to keep everyone productive, something that people love in all the popular languages. Right now is pattern matching right, yes, pattern matching. So if you take a look at this code example down at the bottom, uh we've got a an order at a restaurant. Here, we've got a one, topping pepperoni pizza. If that order comes in, you know, we can match this case and do something with that.

A

If we've got other toppings, we can do something with that. If they order a salad, we can be happy with our salad emojis. It's a good time. What are the goals of the project?

A

We aim to be a high level language for webassembly, so right now, a lot of the languages that we have level assembly that work great for webassembly or c rust. These languages are fantastic and awesome, but these languages can have high learning curves. They can be scary for a lot of developers, so we want to make it as easy as possible for people to get involved. Just like a language like ruby or python, we want to give developers tools to move fast. That means a robust standard library.

A

We want to make sure that you have all the tools you need to get your job done. We also want to make sure you have awesome tooling, like we heard in the talk earlier languages, often like these brand new languages, they don't have the tooling in place. So we worked on tools like a formatter, a language server, making sure that these tools are available.

A

We want to put webassembly hands of all types of developers, not just those who are willing to you know, get down and dirty with some pointers.

A

So uh getting up and running with grain, you can just go to our website download a binary. You can write your first grading program. You can write a hello world whatever you want. This example is just printing out the command line arguments. That's it pretty simple, but now I want to talk a little bit about wage, the webassembly gateway interface.

A

If you want to get up and running writing a web server, this is probably the easiest way to do it. In fact, it's just two lines of code, two print statements. We print out a content, type text plain and we print out hello. World you've got a little configuration you run. Waggy boom you've got a server. You curl that hello world, you just wrote hello world and two lines of code: that's not green! Being awesome! That's just wacky!

A

Logi is just that easy, but extrapolating that and actually using grain, the deus labs team, the team that has created wagy. They have an awesome example of a file server written in green.

A

So if you take a look at this code here, what I love this is just an expert in except for that repo down at the bottom, where we actually handle the result of loading a file. If that file. If we couldn't open the file, then obviously the file doesn't exist. We just say hey, it's not found. Otherwise we can guess a content type very straightforward. We just print it out. We pipe that to standard out and that's it close the file. It's simple, this code isn't scary for folks.

A

That's the whole idea behind grain is trying not to scare folks with the code. That's it. So I want to talk a little bit about atmo. You heard a talk from connor earlier I in my day job I work at suborbital, awesome company. We have this project called atmo, it's similar to wagi in terms of handling requests and things like that. um But it's a it's a tad bit more involved, but it gives you a lot. More features makes things a lot easier for you to do things like http uh requests and things like that.

A

It's also got built-in support for all auto scaling uh infrastructure management. Things like that, so we've got this directive here. This is a simple example of like if you wanted to have a cache set function or a cache kit function. This is how you would declare it, but here this is where I think a language like grain starts to shine.

A

Let's say you had a graphql api and you wanted to add a little caching layer to it. This is all the code you need to do that with atmo. All you have to do is import a couple. Libraries say: you've got your api in this example, I'm using a graphql api over some spacex data.

A

What we do is we check the cache we say hey. uh Do we have a response? That's in the cache for this request that came in. uh If we do then, okay great, we have this cache response, just return it. If there isn't a cache response. Well, then we actually need to go ahead and do the query. So we just say: okay, do this query and then right before we return the result of that we peek in to our little result, and we say hey if we actually got a response, go ahead and cache it.

A

This is really simple. Now this code is all a preview. It's all based on some projects. I've been working on if you've heard of the wedx binding project, I'm adding support for grain, a bunch of other languages, and so this is made possible with that. You'll see this pretty soon, but the thing that gets me excited about all of this is that this isn't scary right. Your average developer can pick this up and start working with it right away. There's no learning curve. There's nothing scary about this. That's what grain's all about!

A

So how can you get involved in what we're doing join the conversation? uh We've got a discord, a really happy friendly community. Any questions you have we're here for you. We can give you you can give us feedback on what we're working on advocate for all of the features that you really want us to have, but please don't come in and say: oscar macros win. Please don't we also have our community meetings in our discord. um So it's a great time to meet the team.

A

Talk to us ask us about everything that we're doing and, of course, there's the discord link there.

A

You can also contribute, um of course, compiler development can be very scary. I like to think that I'm a nice friendly guy, so, if you're interested in compiler development, you can work with me and we'll work together and build something awesome, but otherwise we've got plenty of things in the standard library.

A

That's just writing brand code, which is awesome and other projects in our ecosystem.

A

Of course, open issues. That's going to be one of the easiest ways to get involved. If you find a bug, if you want a feature, just open an issue we'll see it we'll respond to it, it'll be awesome.

A

And, of course you can sponsor us, we don't have anyone who works on grain full-time, but we've got a full team. We do it as a passion project. We really want to bring web assembly to everyone, so any way that you can support our development is awesome and that's about it. um If you have any questions about the language feel free to hit us up on the discord or in the slack channel and more than happy to answer any questions you have. Thank you very much.

B

Thanks uh oscar also thank you for doing the first part twice yep and the second time was it better as we expected it's like, or maybe that's not true, um go ahead and disassemble, you know disconnect the whole thing. uh Radu is getting mic'd up. Are there questions here for oscar, while he's doing that yeah? Can you tell us about the history.

A

Of error handling.

B

A

Yeah, absolutely so um for uh folks who are familiar with the webassembly exception, handling story, uh there's a proposal for exception handling, so uh website languages have had a hard time dealing with exceptions. um So in grain this was a problem for us. We wanted to be able to just try catch stuff right, but what we've opted to do instead is using result types for more things.

A

We really want to be able to say, hey, actually, let's just handle this result, it's not a huge deal to just give back the user result and let them choose what they want to do with it in a nice programmatic way. Instead of using try catch all right.

B

Thanks oscar, thank you very much great stuff.