// the find
bytecodealliance/lucet
Lucet, the Sandboxing WebAssembly Compiler.
Lucet was Fastly's AOT WebAssembly compiler and runtime, built to safely execute untrusted Wasm inside a host process. It's dead — the README leads with an end-of-life notice, and the team migrated to Wasmtime in 2020. Last commit was March 2022.
The AOT compilation model was genuinely fast at instantiation time compared to JIT — useful for edge workloads where cold-start latency matters. The userfaultfd-based pooling allocator was an interesting design for high-concurrency Wasm hosting. The WASI support and test suite were thorough for their era.
It is abandoned — no security patches, no new Wasm proposals, no maintenance of any kind. The features that made it worth using (AOT, pooling allocator) are now in Wasmtime, which has active development and a full security response process. The Linux-only signal handling and userfaultfd dependency made it non-portable from the start. Anyone looking at this for a new project is reading a museum piece.