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I think in the longer run, WASM might displace a lot of both in practical terms.

ehutch79 3y ago
Why would wasm replace containers? If you're going to run a binary why not just compile it for the local system? We've always had 'compile once, run anywhere' but there's always been caveats and gotchas.
- bombela 3y ago
  wasm targets the wasm runtime Virtual Machine (ie: a JavaScript VM). Offering fine grained isolation compared to virtualizing the whole operating system. edit: don't shoot the messenger. I was merely highlighting the main difference between native and webasm in the context of the discussion.
  - meepmorp 3y ago
    You could say the same thing for anything that targets JVM or CLR, and they're far more mature than any JS runtime.
    - outworlder 3y ago
      Or even Lua, which is trivial to sandbox.
- skybrian 3y ago
  Something still compiles a WASM binary for the local system. Possibly, being able to optimize the WASM without recompiling it from source might be a win? Not needing separate binaries for ARM and x86 is nice, so it should run on a Mac more easily. Also, it runs on an edge server or in a browser, even on a phone, if you care about that. I don’t think it will replace Docker files since they let you package up such a wide variety of existing server software and WASM is more limited. But if your software does compile to WASM then maybe you don’t care about that. I think of WASM more like a plugin format, but I expect there will be a lot of engineering effort put into optimizing it, like happened with V8 for JavaScript. Not all web standards win, but betting against one that’s well-established and has a lot of support seems like a mistake.
wongarsu 3y ago
For serverless (as in AWS-lambda-like) I agree. In that usecase WASM provides a better security barrier than containers, with faster cold-start time (which is really important for the scaling promise of these services). For the stuff people run on their Kubernetes clusters I have more mixed expectations. Containers are more universal, but I can totally see a microservice architecture running as a lot of WASM runtimes with a handful of containers.
- cogman10 3y ago
  Particularly in the case of Amazon lambdas, those are running in VMS already (firecracker). Why wouldn't you skip the VM and use a static binary from rust instead?

Why would wasm replace containers? If you're going to run a binary why not just compile it for the local system? We've always had 'compile once, run anywhere' but there's always been caveats and gotchas.

bombela 3y ago
wasm targets the wasm runtime Virtual Machine (ie: a JavaScript VM). Offering fine grained isolation compared to virtualizing the whole operating system. edit: don't shoot the messenger. I was merely highlighting the main difference between native and webasm in the context of the discussion.
- meepmorp 3y ago
  You could say the same thing for anything that targets JVM or CLR, and they're far more mature than any JS runtime.
  - outworlder 3y ago
    Or even Lua, which is trivial to sandbox.
skybrian 3y ago
Something still compiles a WASM binary for the local system. Possibly, being able to optimize the WASM without recompiling it from source might be a win? Not needing separate binaries for ARM and x86 is nice, so it should run on a Mac more easily. Also, it runs on an edge server or in a browser, even on a phone, if you care about that. I don’t think it will replace Docker files since they let you package up such a wide variety of existing server software and WASM is more limited. But if your software does compile to WASM then maybe you don’t care about that. I think of WASM more like a plugin format, but I expect there will be a lot of engineering effort put into optimizing it, like happened with V8 for JavaScript. Not all web standards win, but betting against one that’s well-established and has a lot of support seems like a mistake.

wongarsu 3y ago

For serverless (as in AWS-lambda-like) I agree. In that usecase WASM provides a better security barrier than containers, with faster cold-start time (which is really important for the scaling promise of these services). For the stuff people run on their Kubernetes clusters I have more mixed expectations. Containers are more universal, but I can totally see a microservice architecture running as a lot of WASM runtimes with a handful of containers.

cogman10 3y ago
Particularly in the case of Amazon lambdas, those are running in VMS already (firecracker). Why wouldn't you skip the VM and use a static binary from rust instead?