Nice. I'm excited because there are lots of different ways to run WASM on a server, different ABIs, different runtimes, etc etc. A big move like this might make it easier to standardize around some kind of server-side WASM happy path and also provide pressure to move some of the Wasi feature work along faster.
The Docker+WASM Technical Preview
11–20 of 178 posts
Re: The Docker+WASM Technical Preview
#12Apologies in advance for a bit of a rant, but I sincerely hope the tools growing up around WASM significantly diminish the need for Docker. As an industry, we're so bad at isolation that we have to put a computer (container) inside a computer (VM) inside a computer (hardware) just to achieve any sort of sane guarantees. Then we immediately trade any semblance of sanity for container orchestration. (And please don't t…
Time to watch "The Birth & Death of JavaScript" again.
I don't remember exactly when he says it's time to get rid of containers and VMs, but it's in there...
https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/the-birth-and-death...
Re: The Docker+WASM Technical Preview
#13[deleted]
Re: The Docker+WASM Technical Preview
#14Michael Irwin from Docker here (and author of the blog post too). Happy to answer your questions, hear feedback, and more!
What problem is this solving?
Depends on which "this" you're referring to. We (Docker) are trying to make it easier for developers to use the tools and capabilities they know and love to build, share, and run Wasm applications.
As far as Wasm itself, it's designed to provide a fast, lightweight, secure, and portable binary format. While it was originally designed to help bring native code to the browser, it's quickly spreading to the server side. Many folks are using it for edge/IoT, but it's growing into other areas (saw demos today of even using it in databases as psuedo stored procedures). Happy to dive in more if you have more questions!
Re: The Docker+WASM Technical Preview
#15Apologies in advance for a bit of a rant, but I sincerely hope the tools growing up around WASM significantly diminish the need for Docker. As an industry, we're so bad at isolation that we have to put a computer (container) inside a computer (VM) inside a computer (hardware) just to achieve any sort of sane guarantees. Then we immediately trade any semblance of sanity for container orchestration. (And please don't t…
> sanity and familiarity are not the same
I know this wasn't your main point, but if I could reasonably tattoo this onto my forehead I would.
Re: The Docker+WASM Technical Preview
#16Apologies in advance for a bit of a rant, but I sincerely hope the tools growing up around WASM significantly diminish the need for Docker. As an industry, we're so bad at isolation that we have to put a computer (container) inside a computer (VM) inside a computer (hardware) just to achieve any sort of sane guarantees. Then we immediately trade any semblance of sanity for container orchestration. (And please don't t…
Broadly, we agree. The goal of this Technical Preview is not to encourage Wasm to be mediated by containers in production, but rather to enable people to locally build & package Wasm apps easily. In production, that could look like a number of different scenarios, from "bare metal" edge (just running in a Wasm VM), to running your Wasm workloads in a nomad/k8s cluster if that’s what you need (e.g. if you want hybrid container/wasm orchestration).
Re: The Docker+WASM Technical Preview
#17Earlier quoted context omitted.
What problem is this solving?
Depends on which "this" you're referring to. We (Docker) are trying to make it easier for developers to use the tools and capabilities they know and love to build, share, and run Wasm applications. As far as Wasm itself, it's designed to provide a fast, lightweight, secure, and portable binary format. While it was originally designed to help bring native code to the browser, it's quickly spreading to the server side.…
[deleted]
Re: The Docker+WASM Technical Preview
#18Michael Irwin from Docker here (and author of the blog post too). Happy to answer your questions, hear feedback, and more!
maybe a naive question: is there a way to run some form of docker in the browser? It could be a great education / demo tool
Great question! There isn't a way to run Docker directly in the browser. But, there are tools (like Play with Docker at play-with-docker.com) that lets you interact with a CLI in the browser to run commands against a remote cloud instance. I personally use this a lot for demos and workshops!
But... certainly a neat idea to think about what Wasm-based applications could possibly look like/run in the browser!
Re: The Docker+WASM Technical Preview
#19Great work, WASM is the future! But on the other hand I'm not really happy with the fact that I'm waiting for GC and DOM access since 2019 or something like that and it doesn't seem like we're getting close
What compromises does WASM have relative to plain old native code?
Re: The Docker+WASM Technical Preview
#20Great work, WASM is the future! But on the other hand I'm not really happy with the fact that I'm waiting for GC and DOM access since 2019 or something like that and it doesn't seem like we're getting close
They just want to protect the frontend from the C#/Java crowd.
No chance, we're already compiling those to our wasm-based frontend apps