Is anyone using fastlike? Ongoing interest?

[avidal]

I originally wrote fastlike while working at Khan Academy to ease in our transition to Fastly Compute. It allowed us to run a fully local development server that ran the same edge code as we ran on the actual edge.

When I left Khan Academy I continued to work on fastlike for a period of time and even had some amazing support from @jedisct1, who even used it to test the early versions of https://github.com/jedisct1/zigly.

In the meantime fastly themselves introduced github.com/fastly/Viceroy a first-party tool that works similarly (and shares a lot with the fastly CLI).

While I haven't worked on fastlike much these last few years I'm still proud of what went into it and I've been considering working on it again if only to sate my own interests and curiosity. I know @jedisct1 contributed quite a few changes this past month but I'm not sure if that was for correctness/completions sake or for some other reason.

So, I'm curious if anyone is actually watching here and/or using fastlike in any capacity. If you are, do you have any thoughts or suggestions about the project?

[jedisct1]

Fastlike is still my go-to tool for developing projects on Fastly Compute.

It’s incredibly simple to use, and the code itself is clear, easy to read, and easy to modify, almost like documentation. Since the Fastly Compute ABI isn’t documented, Fastlike is extremely valuable as a reference for understanding how it works.

The verbose logging is also super helpful.

Unlike native applications, WebAssembly can be quite difficult to debug when things go wrong. That’s why I see the future of Fastlike as a powerful tool focused on improving local debugging and application tracing.

[jedisct1]

The VCL counterpart is Falco . Combined with xvcl, that completely transforms the experience of developing for Fastly.

[avidal]

Thanks Frank! I'll admit I used this issue in part as a fishing line because I'm not sure how else to contact you to ask about the recent commits :)

I'll pull down fastlike locally and play around with it some more again. At the very least do a dependency upgrade pass (I know you did some yourself recently as well, but it appears the spec testdata is still using an old version of the fastly crate?).

Also that Falco link is super cool. I really wanted to do something like that when I first built fastlike (if only to more adequately verify the manual translation I was doing from our VCL to wasm).

[avidal]

For instance as to how outdated this is, the fastly-sys crate doesn't even mention xqd_ anymore and instead the ABI methods are all namespaced.

Looking at the current implementation of zigly, would a zigly-built wasm even run on fastlike?

edit: Forgot that we added support for the newer ABI years ago, just never changed the file names and kept the old function names around for backwards compatibility.