FAQ

What is Hippo?

Hippo takes a fresh spin on the PaaS ecosystem, taking advantage of the technology WebAssembly brings to the space.

Hippo works like this: A WebAssembly package is bundled up as a bindle. Bindles are collected together in a bindle server that you can search. Hippo uses bindle under the hood for storing and organizing applications.

Using the hippo command line interface, you can upload new releases or prepare a bindle for local development. In the future, you can use this CLI to create applications, configure channels, gather logs, attach TLS certificates, and other commands you’d expect to use with a PaaS.

Hippo provides a web interface for users to register new accounts, access their applications, and create new environments for testing.

Hippo makes it easy to run WebAssembly applications and services at scale.

Why did you build Hippo?

We built Hippo to help with two things.

First, we want to make it simple to run applications and services compiled to WebAssembly. When we make it easy to deploy and test out our ideas, the WebAssembly community learns how to best run WebAssembly applications in production. We also make it easier for newcomers to get going. Hippo is about growing WebAssembly adoption.

Second, we want to make it easier for teams to manage their application release life cycle. Hippo introduces a concept called “Channels” that eases the process of collaborating on new ideas by automatically deploying your releases based on their version number. Want to test your idea in a staging environment? Create a new “Staging” channel and watch Hippo deploy your development builds live. Hippo helps promote collaboration.

Hippo is a powerful platform. We want to make it easy to manage the apps and services you deploy.

What languages can I use with Hippo?

Hippo can serve any WebAssembly module that was compiled with support for Web Application System Interface or WASI. We provide support (in yo-wasm) for the following languages:

• AssemblyScript
• C
• Rust
• Swift

Other languages that can compile to wasm32-wasi, like Zig and Grain, will also work. You will just need to write your HIPPOFACTS file from scratch.

Many other languages are working on their WebAssembly support. But a language must have a compiler target for WASI before it can be used in Hippo.

What workloads are suited for Hippo?

At this time, applications running on Hippo are executed under a CGI-like runtime powered by WebAssembly. As a result, Hippo is best suited for web applications and micro-services, however in the future we do hope to expand to further use cases once WASI matures.