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Announcing WCGI: WebAssembly and CGI

wasmer.io

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Re: Announcing WCGI: WebAssembly and CGI

#2

Post by smiletondi »

This is genuinely exciting - the prospect of running Wordpress without the usual security concerns is a game-changer. WCGI seems like it could really disrupt the server-side development landscape. Can't wait to see what other applications will benefit from this technology!

Re: Announcing WCGI: WebAssembly and CGI

#3

Post by smiletondi »

smiletondi wrote: post #2

This is genuinely exciting - the prospect of running Wordpress without the usual security concerns is a game-changer. WCGI seems like it could really disrupt the server-side development landscape. Can't wait to see what other applications will benefit from this technology!

Full disclosure, I work at the company behind WCGI, but I truly believe this is a groundbreaking development that will have a significant impact on the industry.

Re: Announcing WCGI: WebAssembly and CGI

#5

Post by syrusakbary »

paulgb wrote: post #4

I've always loved the simplicity and flexibility of CGI. To check my understanding: since CGI just takes a raw request over stdin and returns a response over stdout, would a WCGI wasm module be compatible with WAGI[1] and vice-versa? [1] https://github.com/deislabs/wagi

That's right, both WCGI and WAGI are currently compatible!

Things might evolve a bit different on the mid term, but let's see what the future holds :)

Re: Announcing WCGI: WebAssembly and CGI

#6

Post by la_fayette »

smiletondi wrote: post #3
smiletondi wrote: post #2

This is genuinely exciting - the prospect of running Wordpress without the usual security concerns is a game-changer. WCGI seems like it could really disrupt the server-side development landscape. Can't wait to see what other applications will benefit from this technology!

Full disclosure, I work at the company behind WCGI, but I truly believe this is a groundbreaking development that will have a significant impact on the industry.

Full disclosure, I have only minimal understanding of web assembly, other than using C functions inside a web browser. I run wordpress in a read only docker container, what better security could WCGI bring?

Re: Announcing WCGI: WebAssembly and CGI

#7

Post by joncfoo »

Next thing you know each wasm assembly will need a package format to ship assets with and have the app server provide common resources to all assemblies, e.g. db connection pools, some notion of security, etc.

Replace Wasmer with the a JVM-based app server and WASM assemblies with JVM-bytecode. The big difference is the source language doesn't matter as long as it's able to be run/replaced by WASM bytecode.

We're heading in circles in a lot of ways

Re: Announcing WCGI: WebAssembly and CGI

#8

Post by syrusakbary »

la_fayette wrote: post #6
smiletondi wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Full disclosure, I work at the company behind WCGI, but I truly believe this is a groundbreaking development that will have a significant impact on the industry.

Full disclosure, I have only minimal understanding of web assembly, other than using C functions inside a web browser. I run wordpress in a read only docker container, what better security could WCGI bring?

Here are the main differences with the Docker strategy:

* If you want it to be usable, you will need to ship it with some mechanism that allows running CGI over http (kind of Apache or Nginx), so your container would be bigger than the Wasmer package

* Regarding security: Docker containers needs to rely on hardware virtualization to run securely (via KVM or simlar), aside of a virtualization on the systemcall layer (which depends on the crun layer that you use)

Because of that, Docker containers will have the downside of: being able to run only in one chipset/OS, they will be bigger-sized and they would be slower to start up (even if you use state of the art for running them, aka Firecracker, you still get 250ms vs < 1ms with Wasmer)

Re: Announcing WCGI: WebAssembly and CGI

#9

Post by smiletondi »

la_fayette wrote: post #6
smiletondi wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Full disclosure, I work at the company behind WCGI, but I truly believe this is a groundbreaking development that will have a significant impact on the industry.

Full disclosure, I have only minimal understanding of web assembly, other than using C functions inside a web browser. I run wordpress in a read only docker container, what better security could WCGI bring?

Another aspect to consider is portability. WCGI, built on open standards like WebAssembly & CGI, allows for easier adoption of security improvements/updates across different platforms & environments. Definitely worth exploring alongside read-only Docker containers!

Re: Announcing WCGI: WebAssembly and CGI

#10

Post by syrusakbary »

joncfoo wrote: post #7

Next thing you know each wasm assembly will need a package format to ship assets with and have the app server provide common resources to all assemblies, e.g. db connection pools, some notion of security, etc. Replace Wasmer with the a JVM-based app server and WASM assemblies with JVM-bytecode. The big difference is the source language doesn't matter as long as it's able to be run/replaced by WASM bytecode. We're hea…

Indeed. The JVM did a lot of things right, however they missed three that are now solved with Wasm:

* Completely tied to an ecosystem, and incompatible with another (you could not run C programs in the JVM)

* Proprietary (vs based on an open standard)

* They couldn't run in the browser seamlessly

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