Pollen – distributed WASM runtime, no control plane, single binary

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• Hacker News
• Did you have any applications in mind when you were designing this? Any weakness in precedents that you wanted to rectify? Are you familiar with Lunatic (https://lunatic.solutions/), and wasmCloud (https://wasmcloud.com/) ?
  by esafak
• I'm a little confused about a "zero-trust mesh" where I actually do need to trust the honesty of the nodes performing my computation. I'd suggest less buzzwords and more concrete examples.
  by yencabulator
• No idea why this post has picked up traction 2 days later, I’m out and about right now but will endeavour to respond thoughtfully when I’m back at my keyboard later on!
  by sambigeara
• This is so nice. Encouraging to see such persistent serious efforts in the local-first, control-resistant tech space, even knowing it is a long uphill climb. Hope all the fragmented efforts help move toward something really formidable one day.
  by samantp
• I know the individual words in the description but I'm a bit confused about what this is.

  What would I use Pollen for?

  I'm not sure I understand the "seed" metaphor.

  by kaoD
• Hi everyone, I'm Sam. I started Pollen as an experiment last summer, got carried away, and have landed here.

  It's a single Go binary. Install it on every machine you want in the cluster and they self-organise. Topology is derived deterministically from gossiped state, so workloads land where there's capacity, replicas migrate toward demand, and survivors rehost from failed nodes. The mesh is built on ed25519 identity with signed properties; any TCP or UDP service you pin gets mTLS. Connections punch direct between peers where possible, otherwise they relay through mutually accessible nodes.

  I built it because I'm fascinated by local-first, convergent systems, and because I wanted to see if said systems could be applied to flip the traditional workload orchestration patterns on their head. I also _despise_ the operational complexity of modern systems and the thousands of bolted-on tools they demand. So I've attempted to make Pollen's ergonomics a primary concern (two-ish commands to a cluster, etc).

  It serves busy, live, globally distributed clusters (per the demo), but it's very early days, so don't be surprised by any rough edges!

  Very happy to answer anything in the thread!

  Cheers.

  Docs: https://docs.pln.sh

  by sambigeara
• This is neat, what does the actual throughput look like though?

  Have been hacking on a wasm+webtransport stack for distributed simulation workers and found the ceiling on one connection/worker per machine pretty quick. Had to pin adapters/workers to cores to get the latency I was expecting, then needed to use dedicated tx/rx adapters to eliminate jitter. Some bullshit about interrupt scheduling

  by monster_truck
• I suspect you have something cool, but I think if you told a clearer example story that solves a real-world problem on the homepage it might alleviate some questions I'm seeing (and also having) in the thread here!
  by dbalatero