> What problem is WASM solving here? My understanding is that it's mostly solving sandboxing for multitenant cloud operators. I don't know how right they are,

> What problem is WASM solving here? My understanding is that it's mostly solving sandboxing for multitenant cloud operators. I don't know how right they are, but if they are it's a big deal, because virtualizing and isolating users from one another is very costly today (containerization is not strong enough for isolation – you need vms or something like gvisor). A large portion of that cost comes from overprovisioning, since vms don't scale up and down quickly or cheaply. If wasm holds up to its ambitious aspirations, it could act as a packaging format, a sandbox across users and it could even run in kernel mode (let's pretend spectre and I guess side-channel attacks in general doesn't exist for a moment). For the customer, it's a compile target, which is a promising direction and means in theory that you can mix and match languages at a granular level, but in practice of course this has countless unknowns (did I hear anyone ask about ABIs?). It's more nimble than containers – you no longer need to think or care about the OS and all it's gritty details. At the same time it's also unclear where exactly the runtime boundary lies. File descriptors? A full https stack? And so on. I've come to believe that this boundary is extremely important, and difficult, to get right. So yeah, dreamy and utopian, never failed us before right? If you put on rose tinted glasses it could have implications ranging much further than just cloud. I, for one, am crossing my fingers (and yes, I know how naive I sound).