Run cloud.Function outside of NodeJS vm sandbox

[MarkMcCulloh]

Feature Spec

When invoking a cloud.Function in the simluator, an isolated worker/process is spawned to do the work. This should work/feel similar to simply running the inflight code in a new nodejs process.

Use Cases

Provides a more realistic experience of running JS like you might experience on serverless platforms.

Will fix bugs relating to using VM sandboxes like:

• cloud.Function timeout not working in simulator - vm.runInContext doesn't seem to kill the function #1980
• extern functions behave differently in Wing simulator #4131
• Equality (==) does not work properly inflight #4118

Implementation Notes

Depends on #4697

The two primary options are

• Create an entirely new child process to invoke the cloud.Function by just running node with arguments
• (ideal, imo) Use https://nodejs.org/api/worker_threads.html as a means to isolate work. While this does not give us process isolation, it should isolate everything else. We can then use SharedArrayBuffer to communicate with the simulator by default (very fast), falling back to HTTP otherwise.

Component

SDK

Community Notes

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• If you are interested to work on this issue, please leave a comment.
• If this issue is labeled needs-discussion, it means the spec has not been finalized yet. Please reach out on the #dev channel in the Wing Slack.

[garysassano]

Maybe another option: WinterJS

[garysassano]

Could this possibly address the problem I'm currently facing with Function.invokeAsync()? I can't test this on the simulator because by the time the function finishes executing, the wing test has already printed the results and exited. Given that everything runs within the single-threaded Node.js Event Loop, it's quite challenging.

[MarkMcCulloh]

Maybe another option: WinterJS

In the future I think we'd be interested in exploring different runtimes (and/or allowing easy choosing), but to start with we're focusing on maximizing nodejs compatibility.

Could this possibly address the problem I'm currently facing with Function.invokeAsync()?

Probably not, sounds more like a Promise is dangling somewhere.

[monadabot]

Congrats! 🚀 This was released in Wing 0.59.43.