5 ms·

Sounds and looks like it was fun to implement, but is there a motivating use case? Or is it more for technical/hacking interest?

by jey 3y ago

garganzol 3y ago
I think this may become the basis of an operating environment where you do not have to concentrate on "how to run" something. Instead, you get straight to the job of deciding "what to run" so you can reap the benefits in no time without all the devops and SaaS drama. The closest contemporary thing is fly.io, but recently they became less strategic and more opinionated. Another attempt is sandstorm.io but it was abandoned by the original authors. So... maybe WASM and the initiatives like WASIX will give it to us?
- dboreham 3y ago
  If only someone had built this 25 years ago...
- rapnie 3y ago
  Looks like Sandstorm still has the original founders on the FOSS project they now are, just not as a company. Both co-founders working for Cloudflare now: https://sandstorm.io/about https://sandstorm.io/about
  - paulgb 3y ago
    Ideas from Sandstorm also live on in Cloudflare's Durable Objects: > We don't have any current plans, but... I was the co-founder of Sandstorm.io before going to Cloudflare, and Durable Objects are very much inspired by parts of Sandstorm's design. So yeah, I've absolutely thought about it. ;) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24619148 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24619148
  - ocdtrekkie 3y ago
    The about page is very not updated, FWIW. I started a PR and then did not finish it. About every other week someone looks at it and gleans incorrect insight from it, so I really should finish that PR... Most contributions presently come from outside the original Sandstorm team, but some significant features and refactors have come out since the company shut down from former employees too.
- FooBarWidget 3y ago
  By comparing to fly and sandstorm it sounds more like you're looking to solve the application hosting problem. How is that a problem solved by wasm? It's just a bytecode format and runtime, it doesn't deploy servers and load balancers. The only thing I can think of is that users build wasm binaries/containers and don't care whether the hoster uses x86 or ARM or RISC-V.
  - garganzol 3y ago
    Exactly what you said, plus one more important opportunity (for the distant future): by being architecture-agnostic, the images of running WASM processes can freely travel between the nodes of a cluster, thus providing remote "exec", "fork" and roll-over capabilities. This can transform the way we create distributed software; instead of remote APIs, "queues", "buses" and "workers" we will be able to use the very same primitives we already use for in-proc and inter-proc coordination. So, the whole service like YouTube with transcoders and everything can literally be represented by just one or several executable files in a folder.
  - KRAKRISMOTT 3y ago
    The biggest issue for cloud hosting/self hosting is sandboxing arbitrary hostile code. This almost always requires expensive KVM-based hardware accelerated virtual machines. AWS firecracker is the same shit as hardware accelerated VirtualBox, just heavily stripped down to allow for rapid booting. WASM comes from the CloudFlare functions/V8 ideology where a language sandbox is sufficiently locked down, such that you don't need heavy operating system level virtualization. This way if one application gets compromised, it won't result in the entire physical server being subverted. With a sufficiently complete environment like wasix, you don't even need the rest of the OS or even a kernel. A filesystem and a networking stack is all you need. Just load a unikernel from network boot and you are good to go.
- xet7 3y ago
  > Another attempt is sandstorm.io but it was abandoned by the original authors. Sandstorm is still maintained: https://github.com/sandstorm-io/sandstorm https://github.com/sandstorm-io/sandstorm https://sandstorm.io https://sandstorm.io At Libera.Chat IRC #sandstorm . Welcome :)
  - sitkack 3y ago
    Sandstorm is now Cloudflare.
    - kentonv 3y ago
      No, Sandstorm is not owned by Cloudflare. Cloudflare hired most of the team (myself included) but the company remained independent. Sandstorm the company dissolved last year. The open source project remains alive via the Sandstorm Community on Open Collective[0], but admittedly there has been little activity lately. [0] https://opencollective.com/sandstormcommunity https://opencollective.com/sandstormcommunity
      - sitkack 3y ago
        Sorry, I was being obtuse in that. CF now employs enough people that think "Standstorm" that it will eventually and perhaps does now support all the machinery necessary to implement Standstorm on CF.
        kentonv 3y ago
        Ah! Fair point. ;)
    - ocdtrekkie 3y ago
      Cloudflare hired most of the Sandstorm startup team. It did not acquire Sandstorm, and it remains an independent open source project.
- predictabl3 3y ago
  As a long-time Nix-er, who was into Docker before anyone know what it was, and was committing to Kube pre-1.0, I just kinda giggle. It's all just shuffling puzzle pieces around. Whether you're compiling your Rust to x86_64-linux and shoving it in a container, or compiling it to WASI and shoving it in some runtime... there's still gonna be some horrifying bash script orchestrating it. Because there always is. There's still going to be someone running Kubernetes, or provisioning VMs. > where you do not have to concentrate on "how to run" something. Sounds nice, been hearing this pitch for a long, long time. I really don't mean to be harsh, but it just sounds naive at this point.
paulgb 3y ago
There are a lot of people betting on WASM as a successor to linux containers for many use cases. Sockets and threads have been the main barriers IMHO to that happening. One exciting advantage of WASM over containers is that it can run across different processor architectures and operating systems (the proprietary distribution of Docker runs on Mac but it does so by running a linux VM and containers not built for amd64 are noticeably slower).
- pjmlp 3y ago
  Reinventing Java and .NET application servers...
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]

Sounds and looks like it was fun to implement, but is there a motivating use case? Or is it more for technical/hacking interest?

by jey 3y ago

Sounds and looks like it was fun to implement, but is there a motivating use case? Or is it more for technical/hacking interest?

garganzol 3y ago

I think this may become the basis of an operating environment where you do not have to concentrate on "how to run" something. Instead, you get straight to the job of deciding "what to run" so you can reap the benefits in no time without all the devops and SaaS drama. The closest contemporary thing is fly.io, but recently they became less strategic and more opinionated. Another attempt is sandstorm.io but it was abandoned by the original authors. So... maybe WASM and the initiatives like WASIX will give it to us?

dboreham 3y ago
If only someone had built this 25 years ago...
rapnie 3y ago
Looks like Sandstorm still has the original founders on the FOSS project they now are, just not as a company. Both co-founders working for Cloudflare now: https://sandstorm.io/about https://sandstorm.io/about
- paulgb 3y ago
  Ideas from Sandstorm also live on in Cloudflare's Durable Objects: > We don't have any current plans, but... I was the co-founder of Sandstorm.io before going to Cloudflare, and Durable Objects are very much inspired by parts of Sandstorm's design. So yeah, I've absolutely thought about it. ;) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24619148 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24619148
- ocdtrekkie 3y ago
  The about page is very not updated, FWIW. I started a PR and then did not finish it. About every other week someone looks at it and gleans incorrect insight from it, so I really should finish that PR... Most contributions presently come from outside the original Sandstorm team, but some significant features and refactors have come out since the company shut down from former employees too.
FooBarWidget 3y ago
By comparing to fly and sandstorm it sounds more like you're looking to solve the application hosting problem. How is that a problem solved by wasm? It's just a bytecode format and runtime, it doesn't deploy servers and load balancers. The only thing I can think of is that users build wasm binaries/containers and don't care whether the hoster uses x86 or ARM or RISC-V.
- garganzol 3y ago
  Exactly what you said, plus one more important opportunity (for the distant future): by being architecture-agnostic, the images of running WASM processes can freely travel between the nodes of a cluster, thus providing remote "exec", "fork" and roll-over capabilities. This can transform the way we create distributed software; instead of remote APIs, "queues", "buses" and "workers" we will be able to use the very same primitives we already use for in-proc and inter-proc coordination. So, the whole service like YouTube with transcoders and everything can literally be represented by just one or several executable files in a folder.
- KRAKRISMOTT 3y ago
  The biggest issue for cloud hosting/self hosting is sandboxing arbitrary hostile code. This almost always requires expensive KVM-based hardware accelerated virtual machines. AWS firecracker is the same shit as hardware accelerated VirtualBox, just heavily stripped down to allow for rapid booting. WASM comes from the CloudFlare functions/V8 ideology where a language sandbox is sufficiently locked down, such that you don't need heavy operating system level virtualization. This way if one application gets compromised, it won't result in the entire physical server being subverted. With a sufficiently complete environment like wasix, you don't even need the rest of the OS or even a kernel. A filesystem and a networking stack is all you need. Just load a unikernel from network boot and you are good to go.
xet7 3y ago
> Another attempt is sandstorm.io but it was abandoned by the original authors. Sandstorm is still maintained: https://github.com/sandstorm-io/sandstorm https://github.com/sandstorm-io/sandstorm https://sandstorm.io https://sandstorm.io At Libera.Chat IRC #sandstorm . Welcome :)
- sitkack 3y ago
  Sandstorm is now Cloudflare.
  - kentonv 3y ago
    No, Sandstorm is not owned by Cloudflare. Cloudflare hired most of the team (myself included) but the company remained independent. Sandstorm the company dissolved last year. The open source project remains alive via the Sandstorm Community on Open Collective[0], but admittedly there has been little activity lately. [0] https://opencollective.com/sandstormcommunity https://opencollective.com/sandstormcommunity
    - sitkack 3y ago
      Sorry, I was being obtuse in that. CF now employs enough people that think "Standstorm" that it will eventually and perhaps does now support all the machinery necessary to implement Standstorm on CF.
      - kentonv 3y ago
        Ah! Fair point. ;)
  - ocdtrekkie 3y ago
    Cloudflare hired most of the Sandstorm startup team. It did not acquire Sandstorm, and it remains an independent open source project.
predictabl3 3y ago
As a long-time Nix-er, who was into Docker before anyone know what it was, and was committing to Kube pre-1.0, I just kinda giggle. It's all just shuffling puzzle pieces around. Whether you're compiling your Rust to x86_64-linux and shoving it in a container, or compiling it to WASI and shoving it in some runtime... there's still gonna be some horrifying bash script orchestrating it. Because there always is. There's still going to be someone running Kubernetes, or provisioning VMs. > where you do not have to concentrate on "how to run" something. Sounds nice, been hearing this pitch for a long, long time. I really don't mean to be harsh, but it just sounds naive at this point.

paulgb 3y ago

There are a lot of people betting on WASM as a successor to linux containers for many use cases. Sockets and threads have been the main barriers IMHO to that happening. One exciting advantage of WASM over containers is that it can run across different processor architectures and operating systems (the proprietary distribution of Docker runs on Mac but it does so by running a linux VM and containers not built for amd64 are noticeably slower).

pjmlp 3y ago
Reinventing Java and .NET application servers...
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]