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A comparison between WASM and "containers" is meaningful because in popular usage there's a cottage industry of WASM-based container solutions with the express
by hansvm 3y ago
A comparison between WASM and "containers" is meaningful because in popular usage there's a cottage industry of WASM-based container solutions with the express goal (and co-evolved with the language to make this possible) of simplifying some of the thornier design decisions that make other containerization solutions easier to get started with (can just drop in any binary and dependencies) but also less performant for some set of tasks (have to set up network cgroups and other garbage). The phrase "WASM" isn't just being used to refer to the actual stack machine.
- jmillikin 3y agoWASM is WebAssembly. Words have meanings. If someone wants to try to advertise some weird custom platform that uses WASM as an intermediate bytecode for its packaging format then that's fine, but they'll need to pick a different name.
- hansvm 3y agoWASI is a part of the WASM charter, and parts of WASM are explicitly designed to be friendly to such ideas; It's not quite _just_ some choice of bytecode. Besides, words are just approximations of thoughts, and even on the best of days the delineations aren't crisp. There's a critical mass of people using WASM+containers to refer to WASM ... plus containers (especially those built on the core tech supported by the WASM mission -- WASI -- like the platform tested in the article).