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WebAssembly: Docker Without Containers

wasmlabs.dev

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Re: WebAssembly: Docker Without Containers

#71

Post by nine_k »

ilyt wrote: post #59
tony-allan wrote: post #2

If WASM+WASI existed in 2008, we wouldn't have needed to create Docker. That's how important it is. WebAssembly on the server is the future of computing. - Solomon Hykes (co-founder of Docker) https://twitter.com/solomonstre/status/1111004913222324225

"We put all eggs in WASM basked, please adopt it!" - guy that founded a thing the rest of industry just did better before he was able to capitalize on it.

> the rest of industry just did better before

Citation needed.

Well, I know about BSD jails and Solaris (later Illumos, etc) zones. How easy were they to deploy to an average cloud? How easy was it to reproducibly build and distribute them?

Or what else would you offer as a better docker alternative from 10 years ago?

Re: WebAssembly: Docker Without Containers

#72

Post by kenjackson »

ridruejo wrote: post #39
azangru wrote: post #36

When will we reach a point when articles and talks no longer start with "let me explain to you what webassembly is". After all, you don't see the same introductions in articles about javascript, or python, or even rust. When seeing an article starting with such introduction - after hundreds of other articles did the same - I never know how deep to expect it to go, and whether to continue reading.

I completely understand and we debated it a lot when writing the article. At the end, given that the audience was existing Docker users, we erred on the side of adding that introduction. In other, more technical articles we just dive right in: https://wasmlabs.dev/articles/php-dev-server-on-wasm/

I thought the intro was good and important. I’d read about web assembly before, but I learned new stuff in the intro.

Re: WebAssembly: Docker Without Containers

#73

Post by pjmlp »

ilyt wrote: post #66
pjmlp wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed, he just had to make use of JVM or CLR based application servers instead. That is what this whole trend is all about, replicating application servers with WASM. Every time I need to dive into k8s stuff, I can only think "this was so much easier when configuring WebSphere and EAR deployments".

Well, having essentially a VM that was supposedly designed to be language-agnostic and easy to sandbox is a benefit over a VM that is designed for single language and never put much thought into embedding.

Even being language-agnostic was a path already trailed by Burroughs and IBM mainframes, besides lots of other ones.

Re: WebAssembly: Docker Without Containers

#74

Post by bzzzt »

pjmlp wrote: post #56
threeseed wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

a) Kubernetes is far simpler and more consistent to me than WebSphere/EAR. b) Kubernetes is the platform as well as the application server.

The amount of YAML spaghetti I have to deal with says otherwise.

Dealing with the XML spaghetti from most Java EE containers isn't much better though.

Re: WebAssembly: Docker Without Containers

#75

Post by pjmlp »

bzzzt wrote: post #74
pjmlp wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The amount of YAML spaghetti I have to deal with says otherwise.

Dealing with the XML spaghetti from most Java EE containers isn't much better though.

- Schema validation

- IDE code completion

- Can be machine generated/updated via the GUI management administration and graphical tooling on IDEs

Good luck doing that with YAML.

Re: WebAssembly: Docker Without Containers

#76

Post by mhh__ »

tony-allan wrote: post #2

If WASM+WASI existed in 2008, we wouldn't have needed to create Docker. That's how important it is. WebAssembly on the server is the future of computing. - Solomon Hykes (co-founder of Docker) https://twitter.com/solomonstre/status/1111004913222324225

Does it actually exist now?

Re: WebAssembly: Docker Without Containers

#77

Post by ClumsyPilot »

nine_k wrote: post #65
tony-allan wrote: post #2

If WASM+WASI existed in 2008, we wouldn't have needed to create Docker. That's how important it is. WebAssembly on the server is the future of computing. - Solomon Hykes (co-founder of Docker) https://twitter.com/solomonstre/status/1111004913222324225

This sounds incredible, as if the co-founder of Docker fails to understand the crucial value proposition of Docker (hence Docker's financial troubles, maybe). The point of Docker is the ability to take the existing Rube-Goldberg-machine configurations of software, in any and many languages (including the gluing bash scripts), and put it basically unchanged into a controlled, isolated, replicated, shippable environmen…

Except there is no secure docker runtime, and there never will be. If you want secure, you have tp put it in a VM , which gives you a performance penalty again.

Secure means you can run arbitrary untrusted code, and webassembly cam do that, and docker can't.

Re: WebAssembly: Docker Without Containers

#78

Post by cle »

batmansmk wrote: post #30
pulse7 wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If this statement is true, there is no need for Docker, because JVM+JAR existed in 2008! Docker can do more than WASM or JVM+JAR: it can run non-WASM and non-JVM apps like PostgreSQL, etc...

You can compile any C / C++ app down to wasm. In fact that’s the raison d’être of the technology: to provide a portable safe way to run binaries. Here is a link to Postgres in wasm for instance: https://supabase.com/blog/postgres-wasm . The way it works is that instead of outputting assembly for a given architecture in the backend compiler, it outputs wasm instructions that are designed to map all architectures, not…

> You can compile any C / C++ app down to wasm.

This is incorrect, there is a long list of limitations that your C/C++ code must conform to in order to compile to WASM. There's a whole section dedicated to this in the Emscripten docs: https://emscripten.org/docs/porting/index.html.

The chances your existing C/C++ app will compile to WASM and run correctly are much smaller than with Docker. However, the chances your WASM-compiled code will be able to run in a browser are much higher than with Docker (which is the real "killer use case" IMO).

> not like the jvm which is designed primarily for Java in the front end

This is also wrong, JVM bytecode is explicitly designed to be polylingual and is the compilation target for many non-Java languages like Scala, Kotlin, and Clojure. WASM being a compilation target is not what makes it unique from the JVM.

Re: WebAssembly: Docker Without Containers

#79

Post by espadrine »

imtringued wrote: post #21
pjmlp wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, those that act like WebAssembly is reinvinting the world kind of do. And applications get tied to the WebAssembly ecosystem, it is also a single one.

What's wrong with a "JVM but for everyone who isn't a Java developer"? If the model works, why shouldn't there be competitors and wide spread adoption?

JVM wasn’t just for Java developers (Kotlin, Clojure, Ruby could compile to it); but it was easiest for Java, and other languages didn’t elect to build on the JVM interface by default, rather adopting POSIX (and either a custom bytecode or assembly) as the interface.

WASM likely won’t convince all languages to switch to its bytecode by default. Its adoption story requires enough people to maintain this non-standard compilation pipeline.

Which is fine, but beyond the bytecode, the productivity will only be maintained if it offers an equal or superior interface to POSIX. Right now, WASI is not it. A lot of basic elements are experimental, like file seek, multi-process, threads, SIMD, GPU programming…

People will believe the hype, miss the caveats, use it at work, and have their project fail. Companies will blacklist the technology.

In my mind, it is too early for them to be so publicly dithyrambic. All WASM publications should link to a page that details all WASI features that are still experimental.

Re: WebAssembly: Docker Without Containers

#80

Post by chillfox »

nine_k wrote: post #71
ilyt wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"We put all eggs in WASM basked, please adopt it!" - guy that founded a thing the rest of industry just did better before he was able to capitalize on it.

> the rest of industry just did better before Citation needed. Well, I know about BSD jails and Solaris (later Illumos, etc) zones. How easy were they to deploy to an average cloud? How easy was it to reproducibly build and distribute them? Or what else would you offer as a better docker alternative from 10 years ago?

"How easy were they to..."

They weren't, like at all (yes, I have tried them). The dockerfile for repeatable (enough) image builds and the simple command line for running a container without having to mess with making a config for some init system is really the killer features of docker.

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