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At the end of the day most software is not composed of a single application. To further complicate matters, many applications can't even run on a single server

by eyberg 5y ago

At the end of the day most software is not composed of a single application. To further complicate matters, many applications can't even run on a single server today. Many of the companies that users here work at have applications that span hundreds or thousands of servers. I think part of the argument here is that our software outgrew the one server/one operating system model a very long time ago.

ignoramous 5y ago
Hi Ian: > I think part of the argument here is that our software outgrew the one server/one operating system model a very long time ago. That it certainly did. I want to know what's your opinion of WASM and where do you see WASM and its nanoprocess model (capability-based security) fit into all of this [0]? I look up to it as a tech midway between the KVM and unikernels; and firmly believe WASM is poised to get big soon. [0] https://www.infoq.com/news/2019/11/wasm-nanoprocesses-security/ https://www.infoq.com/news/2019/11/wasm-nanoprocesses-securi...
- eyberg 5y ago
  WASM (and WASI) are interesting and I personally know a lot of people excited about it. We've also ran a few wasm runtimes such as wasmer inside Nanos. Having said that, there are a handful of technical limitations {raw sockets, 32bit, dynamic linking, performance, security, threads, TLS} that exist today that prevent a bunch of applications being deployed there and while most of them can be dealt with technically I think just because of where WASM descends from (the browsers) there are some organizational (read: standardization) issues that will probably prevent a lot of it from being dealt with. It's been a while since I looked at it but to me none of these are hard technical issues - they are just issues that the WASM community will need to decide in which direction they want to go and how married to the browsers do they want to be.

by eyberg 5y ago

ignoramous 5y ago

Hi Ian: > I think part of the argument here is that our software outgrew the one server/one operating system model a very long time ago. That it certainly did. I want to know what's your opinion of WASM and where do you see WASM and its nanoprocess model (capability-based security) fit into all of this [0]? I look up to it as a tech midway between the KVM and unikernels; and firmly believe WASM is poised to get big soon. [0] https://www.infoq.com/news/2019/11/wasm-nanoprocesses-security/ https://www.infoq.com/news/2019/11/wasm-nanoprocesses-securi...

eyberg 5y ago
WASM (and WASI) are interesting and I personally know a lot of people excited about it. We've also ran a few wasm runtimes such as wasmer inside Nanos. Having said that, there are a handful of technical limitations {raw sockets, 32bit, dynamic linking, performance, security, threads, TLS} that exist today that prevent a bunch of applications being deployed there and while most of them can be dealt with technically I think just because of where WASM descends from (the browsers) there are some organizational (read: standardization) issues that will probably prevent a lot of it from being dealt with. It's been a while since I looked at it but to me none of these are hard technical issues - they are just issues that the WASM community will need to decide in which direction they want to go and how married to the browsers do they want to be.