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The biggest missing thing (for production) is observability. Look at old-good JVM. It has tons of tools to analyze and understand behavior of your production s
by blacklion 4y ago
The biggest missing thing (for production) is observability.
Look at old-good JVM. It has tons of tools to analyze and understand behavior of your production system. You could have thread dumps (stack traces of all existing threads) at any moment with negligible performance impact, you could dump heap and analyze it off-site, you could have tons of metrics, about each dark corner of mutexes, GC process, about JIT, including, if you need it, generated native code!
Many of these thing you could get on production, not in sand-box.
If you system behaves strangely, live-locks, consume more memory than you think it should, tharsh GC, you name it, you have all tools to understand what is wrong, find bugs or mis-configurations, etc.
With all these new-and-shiny WASM and not-so-shiny JS VMs you mostly in the dark now. Service become unresponsive? latency goes to the roof? Only thing you could do - restart.
It is not property of WASM per se, but this infrastructure is too immature now, comparing to 25+ year old technology.
- spreiti 4y agoThis a 1000 times. People like to hate on Java but when there are problems to diagnose on production systems it is second to none. But from my experience most people don't know these tools even exist so the only thing they do is restarting and guessing where the problem might be if it persists.
- cogman10 4y agoFlight recorder is a godsend and I've not seen it's equal in any other language/ecosystem. Any JVM anywhere can answer the question "why am I running slow" with a quick run of flight recorder. Memory, CPU, socket time, GC impact, TLB, thread dumps, etc. It's all there in one file that imposes something like a 1->2% performance impact if you run it constantly. It's just so good.
- ridruejo 4y agoCompletely agree. Observability and debugging are some areas where the ecosystem is quite immature or inexistent. My take is that wasm is more or less where the web was in 97-98 Lots of excitement and possibilities but also lots of technical challenges and experimentation