4 ms·

An interesting thought, but are you suggesting we could run arbitrary Rust code, unsandboxed, in users' browsers?

• derefr 5y ago
  Miscommunication, I think. In the context of a web browser, the browser JS execution-context is itself already a sandbox, so running WASM there isn't necessarily doing any sandboxing per se (although it can); it's more just serving as the current state-of-the-art way to host arbitrary native code in the browser. (Too bad about PPAPI.) You'd still be using WASM here whether there was any sandboxing benefit or not. I was instead more thinking about the Google Earth "native" desktop + mobile apps. Those are the environments I presumed you meant when you said that Google Earth is "sandboxed by WASM." Those deploy environments are where adding an intentional sandbox layer would get you some additional safety, over just having the user run a "raw" native C++ executable on their device.
  • verdagon 5y ago
    Thanks for the clarification, yep I meant the web client. We didn't rewrite iOS/Android either, any memory unsafety bugs just cause odd behavior on that user's device, and wouldn't e.g. give an attacker root access to our servers. The costs of the occasional memory unsafety bug didn't seem to approach the cost of a rewrite. I should say, rewriting servers (especially public-facing ones) in a memory-safe language like Rust or Java is a much more reasonable proposition, but for client code, it's a slightly different story.