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What’s the advantage of server side WebAssembly over just running a Rust/whatever application?

• politelemon 3y ago
  My limited understanding from various blog posts is that you can still get the benefits of a container, but much faster startup/runtimes. As in WASM provides performance very close to native.
• pseudosavant 3y ago
  Security isolation too. I am using a WASM-based image processing pipeline for handling user submitted images. Much safer than trying to run a binary (Imagemagick, ffmpeg, etc) written in an unsafe language. In my case, the WASM does not have access to anything outside the sandbox.
  • imhoguy 3y ago
    Have you compared how much performance overhead has such sandbox in comparison to native (Linux) binary? Especially video processing. I just wonder if WASM app can even benefit from SSE4 or AVX instructions.
• e12e 3y ago
  As siblings have mentioned: sandboxing. You don't need your language/runtime to support arm/other to run same compile artifact on arm32, arm64, power5 and amd64 - compile to wasm once, run anywhere (nginx unit would still need to support your target). Your runtime theoretically don't need is support - compile to wasm, run on FreeBSD/arm. You can compile your c microservice to wasm, and your rust microservice, and your c++ microservice to wasm - and deploy them sandboxed via the same stack - reducing complexity (note that another option is to deploy via nginx unit - different way to reduce complexity).