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The Docker+WASM Technical Preview

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Re: The Docker+WASM Technical Preview

#51

Post by VWWHFSfQ »

Twirrim wrote: post #43
mikesir87 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

I'm honestly really confused about the specific role docker is playing here. What, exactly, is Docker doing? Is it compiling the application? Is it making a runtime for the wasm binary? Is it being the runtime for the wasm binary, so the end user builds through whatever usual build processes and gets a binary they can then easily run? If the wasm binary is lightweight and portable, why is docker useful? edit: Given t…

Yeah. Not trying to be cynical, but this feels like someone at Docker said "we need to have a WASM story" and this is what they came up with. I really don't see the point.

Re: The Docker+WASM Technical Preview

#52

Post by lolinder »

Does anyone have a good explanation for what Docker+WASM actually is? This announcement explains what WASM is and what Docker is, but I already knew both of those and am still confused about what Docker+WASM is. Is it just wrapping a WASM binary in a Docker container?

Re: The Docker+WASM Technical Preview

#53

Post by qbasic_forever »

mikesir87 wrote: post #31
DeathArrow wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would I want to compile my app to WASM if it's not running in a browser?

Great question! The promise (and excitement) of Wasm is to have portable, secure, quick-to-start, and low resource usage apps. So, write code in Go, Rust, C++, or any other language that can output to Wasm (up to over 40 now!) and you're good to go! The binaries are super small too. Happy to dive in more too!

Why not run that go/rust/etc code natively on the machine though? Is there extra sandboxing, network/filesystem virtualization or anything gained by compiling to and running in a WASM environment?

Re: The Docker+WASM Technical Preview

#54

Post by javaunsafe2019 »

nateabele wrote: post #5
gigel82 wrote: post #2

Insert "BUT WHY?" GIF here. Seriously, if you're in a position to be running native code in your environment why would you chose WASM? If you're building WASM for the web, is it really more expensive to build a pure native target out of the same source? Surely, performance wise you'll always be ahead going native.

Put simply, more powerful isolation than Docker (with explicit, granular managed effects), and a simpler operating model, i.e. no container orchestration. You can actually compile modules from disparate stacks that call into one another in a single runtime.

And for just that give up all the freedom docker runtimes give us? I don’t want to be forced to use go or rust - maybe I’d like to use bash, node or even the jvm depending on the problem I need to solve.

And I don’t understand why docker is supporting this as docker + wasm makes no sense at all as wasm wants to replace docker as the runtime provider …

Re: The Docker+WASM Technical Preview

#55

Post by saidinesh5 »

DeathArrow wrote: post #21
mikesir87 wrote: post #4

Michael Irwin from Docker here (and author of the blog post too). Happy to answer your questions, hear feedback, and more!

Why would I want to compile my app to WASM if it's not running in a browser?

It depends on whom you ask/what your app does.

For serverless usecases, cloudflare etc.. found that it would be faster to just call a function from a wasm binary than spin up a whole docker container [1]. Which basically translated to cost savings.

In the last company I worked for [2], we saw wasm as a way to easily ship user code in a cross platform way. We mostly targeted edge-ml use cases. Wasm allowed us to package all the "libraries"/functions needed to run the user code securely. So users created and tested out their ML apps in browser and deployed them to all the platforms we supported. (Mobile, Browser, Embedded). As an added bonus they could write each of their functions in any language that compiled to wasm, and just ship it as one "app".

1. https://blog.cloudflare.com/cloud-computing-without-containe... 2. https://hotg.dev/

Re: The Docker+WASM Technical Preview

#56

Post by stavros »

screamingninja wrote: post #40
pistoriusp wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hey! Peter from Snaplet here. This is really exciting stuff. We created the OSS postgres-wasm ( https://github.com/snaplet/postgres-wasm ) example a few weeks ago. An idea I'm playing around with is something like: 1. Visit https://postgresql.com/try?version=14.x 2. Visit https://nodejs.com/try?version=16.15.1 3. Visit https://edit.com Edit.com opens a text-editor and terminal where I have access to the NodeJS binary…

All three links that you posted appears to be either broken or malicious. Are you just trying to explain a concept using example domain names? Consider " .example" or " .example.com" (see RFC 2606) instead of potentially malicious domains.

He's saying that the sites could provide ready-to-try binaries of their products that run in a tab immediately.

Re: The Docker+WASM Technical Preview

#57

Post by theplumber »

lolinder wrote: post #52

Does anyone have a good explanation for what Docker+WASM actually is? This announcement explains what WASM is and what Docker is, but I already knew both of those and am still confused about what Docker+WASM is. Is it just wrapping a WASM binary in a Docker container?

I guess it's a wasm runtime. Basically a way to execute a wasm binary just like you use docker to execute a x64 binary

Re: The Docker+WASM Technical Preview

#58

Post by [deleted] »

lolinder wrote: post #52

Does anyone have a good explanation for what Docker+WASM actually is? This announcement explains what WASM is and what Docker is, but I already knew both of those and am still confused about what Docker+WASM is. Is it just wrapping a WASM binary in a Docker container?

[deleted]

Re: The Docker+WASM Technical Preview

#59

Post by nequo »

qbasic_forever wrote: post #53
mikesir87 wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Great question! The promise (and excitement) of Wasm is to have portable, secure, quick-to-start, and low resource usage apps. So, write code in Go, Rust, C++, or any other language that can output to Wasm (up to over 40 now!) and you're good to go! The binaries are super small too. Happy to dive in more too!

Why not run that go/rust/etc code natively on the machine though? Is there extra sandboxing, network/filesystem virtualization or anything gained by compiling to and running in a WASM environment?

AFAIK yes. This interview covers the safety aspects of WASM and you might find it interesting:

https://rustacean-station.org/episode/030-krustlet/

Re: The Docker+WASM Technical Preview

#60

Post by syrusakbary »

timanglade wrote: post #47
syrusakbary wrote: post #39

This is great. We’ve been chatting with Docker for a little bit (I’m Syrus, from Wasmer) and it’s great to see that they are making progress on improving the developer experience around WebAssembly. However, I see Docker (and thus, Kubernetes) is as technologies of the past (I don’t intend to start any flamewar, I really believe this by heart). Metal compute (Web 1.0) lead to VMs which then lead to Containers (Web 2.…

Long live Wasm indeed! Obviously we feel a bit differently about Docker and k8s being in the past — Docker is used by 68% of professional developers according to the latest SO survey[0], and k8s is still growing in popularity at 28%. But obviously the technology landscape changes rapidly, and maybe one day (we hope) Wasm will be at 28%, 68% or higher. We’re frankly just excited about the possibilities, and wanted to…

Hi Tim. The stats logic will probably apply as well for gas car makers vs electric ones, or any field to that matter that might be at risk of disruption in a perceivable timeframe (but are not disrupted just yet).

Don’t get me wrong though, I have tons of admiration for Docker (in fact, Solomon Hykes is an investor in Wasmer) and the great ergonomics you introduced along the way to help developers and reach the current status quo. Without you guys probably we would have reached the cloud advancements much later in time. However, we paid those advances with an order of magnitude greater complexity in other layers (with the likes of cloud providers profiting from it).

But now I sincerely believe we need more powerful abstractions for the edge, serverless and Web 3.

In any case, I’m incredibly excited that you are researching more into WebAssembly. That’s great for the ecosystem and also will help to bring more devs onboard. Thanks for all the work!

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