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While I was at Cloudflare, I loved working on the Workers platform. Their decision to embed a programmable layer into the CDN has transformed the company into s

While I was at Cloudflare, I loved working on the Workers platform. Their decision to embed a programmable layer into the CDN has transformed the company into something far bigger. This made me realize that every app should be extensible as deeply as possible - going beyond HTTP APIs and Webhooks. Today, we've opened up our platform making it simple to bring next-generation extensibility to your application & safely execute end-user code in-process. I believe we've all faced the desire to run user code, and as modern products become increasingly engrained in our workflows and stacks, this desire is stronger than ever. XTP makes it safe and easy to do this leveraging the power of WebAssembly. On top of this secure core, XTP provides authorization, code uploading, testing, simulation & validation, as well as easy to use SDKs to load and execute user code. We're excited to open up this platform in public beta & are eager for your feedback!

mdaniel 2y ago
> This made me realize that every app should be extensible as deeply as possible I believed that so strongly that I put my money into https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/shanecelis/emacsy-an-embeddable-emacs https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/shanecelis/emacsy-an-em... (and https://github.com/shanecelis/emacsy https://github.com/shanecelis/emacsy ) but as one can see it didn't shake out I'd guess https://frida.re/ https://frida.re/ is the closest I know of for modifying software, but for sure isn't as easy as Violentmonkey. The advantage over your description of XTP is that both Frida and Violentmonkey don't require the permission of the target app/website, so that seems like a huge win
- nilslice 2y ago
  These are also super interesting customization / mod tools. I think you hit the nail on the head though, which is that XTP is something the software creator intentionally adds preempting new ideas from end-users. Also, we have done a ton of work to make it very easy for a plugin developer to build against an extension point, using idiomatic generated libraries based on the apps’ specification. This means that a developer can generate plugin boilerplate (currently in Go, TS, Rust, Python, Zig, C++ and C#) and immediately start working with easily understandable functions and types. In contrast to even really good REST API docs, this feels extremely productive.

mdaniel 2y ago

> This made me realize that every app should be extensible as deeply as possible I believed that so strongly that I put my money into https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/shanecelis/emacsy-an-embeddable-emacs https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/shanecelis/emacsy-an-em... (and https://github.com/shanecelis/emacsy https://github.com/shanecelis/emacsy ) but as one can see it didn't shake out I'd guess https://frida.re/ https://frida.re/ is the closest I know of for modifying software, but for sure isn't as easy as Violentmonkey. The advantage over your description of XTP is that both Frida and Violentmonkey don't require the permission of the target app/website, so that seems like a huge win

nilslice 2y ago
These are also super interesting customization / mod tools. I think you hit the nail on the head though, which is that XTP is something the software creator intentionally adds preempting new ideas from end-users. Also, we have done a ton of work to make it very easy for a plugin developer to build against an extension point, using idiomatic generated libraries based on the apps’ specification. This means that a developer can generate plugin boilerplate (currently in Go, TS, Rust, Python, Zig, C++ and C#) and immediately start working with easily understandable functions and types. In contrast to even really good REST API docs, this feels extremely productive.