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In my opinion this is a fascinating approach, and it may end up transforming our industry. But the main question I've had is how big the overhead is, specifically since modules don't share their wasm Memory. That means data will be constantly copied between them. Compared to regular static or even dynamic linking, that may be a noticeable slowdown.
In my opinion this is a fascinating approach, and it may end up transforming our industry. But the main question I've had is how big the overhead is, specifically since modules don't share their wasm Memory. That means data will be constantly copied between them. Compared to regular static or even dynamic linking, that may be a noticeable slowdown.
> specifically since modules don't share their wasm Memory. That means data will be constantly copied between them. We're working on that. We want to make it possible for modules to share memory in a controlled way, without giving access to their entire address space.
So much bullshit, in the end just to strip a little bit more the user and the developer of any liberty. The dream of us corp controlled appstore for pc desktops. Who will control what you can do through the sandbox? Intel, Mozilla, Google... So one day your soft will have to be signed by them and will refuse to let you adblock ... For your own safety...
If you want to fiddle with your own computer, you can write your own code to do exactly that
In my opinion this is a fascinating approach, and it may end up transforming our industry. But the main question I've had is how big the overhead is, specifically since modules don't share their wasm Memory. That means data will be constantly copied between them. Compared to regular static or even dynamic linking, that may be a noticeable slowdown.
>specifically since modules don't share their wasm Memory. That means data will be constantly copied between them. It is possible today to have modules import memory from the host, which means the host can provide the same imported memory to multiple modules. Then modules can pass pointers to each other without needing any memcpys. It does require the modules to not tread on each other though, such as by requiring th…
The article does mention a possible future extension of multiple wasm modules in a single nanoprocess (the section with "allowing native-style dynamic linking"), and JoshTriplett mentions in another comment some future ideas of sharing parts of memory but not all. Those things will compromise the strict initial requirement of no shared memory, and improve performance.
Those are the interesting questions for me - is not sharing memory too much overhead, and if it is, is there a way to relax that which preserves enough security with enough performance.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> specifically since modules don't share their wasm Memory. That means data will be constantly copied between them. We're working on that. We want to make it possible for modules to share memory in a controlled way, without giving access to their entire address space.
Interesting! Is that written up somewhere public?
Super cynical, I realize, but whenever I see the description “secure by default” for something computer related, and they don’t mean, “we unplugged it,” I assume what they really mean is, “we made the code so complex we can’t find the problems.”
I'm one of the folks working with the Alliance, and I'm incredibly excited about WebAssembly outside the browser. Happy to answer questions. Imagine extensions for applications or databases, written in any language you want, with no ability to exfiltrate data. Imagine supporting a safe plugin API that isn't just for C and languages that FFI to C, but works natively with safe datatypes. Today, if you want to be extens…
Super cynical, I realize, but whenever I see the description “secure by default” for something computer related, and they don’t mean, “we unplugged it,” I assume what they really mean is, “we made the code so complex we can’t find the problems.”
Bringing the web up to speed with WebAssembly
https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cluster=14979605902538775...
> Imagine extensions for applications or databases, written in any language you want, with no ability to exfiltrate data
That's what we are working towards on Wasmer, the server side WebAssembly runtime - https://github.com/wasmerio/wasmer
In fact, we already have a lot of different language integrations (maintained by us and the community) and our software is the pioneer on the space.
Is there any reason on why you think is a good idea to do a side-alliance instead of collaborating with us and the community so users and developers can be the ultimate beneficiaries? (it's good, it just seems is not an alliance made for the users, which it's a bit weird from my perspective)