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Announcing WCGI: WebAssembly and CGI

wasmer.io

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Re: Announcing WCGI: WebAssembly and CGI

#11

Post by pookeh »

syrusakbary wrote: post #10
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

There was a time when JVM ran in the browsers.

Re: Announcing WCGI: WebAssembly and CGI

#12

Post by syrusakbary »

pookeh wrote: post #11
syrusakbary wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

There was a time when JVM ran in the browsers.

Yup, via Java Applets. But they were a pain to use, that's why I intentionally wrote "seamlessly" :P

Re: Announcing WCGI: WebAssembly and CGI

#15

Post by ex3ndr »

syrusakbary wrote: post #12
pookeh wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There was a time when JVM ran in the browsers.

Yup, via Java Applets. But they were a pain to use, that's why I intentionally wrote "seamlessly" :P

GWT allowed to run it without applets, also much more efficient than any current stack (since they dont support closure compiler)

Re: Announcing WCGI: WebAssembly and CGI

#16

Post by 0xbadcafebee »

PHP was compiled into WASM, so now you can run PHP apps "as WASM". How is this different from just running PHP, without WASM? Apparently it's faster, but also they make this claim:

"Picture running Wordpress and not having to worry about attackers breaking into your system"

uh, so, you sprinkled some WASM magic on some code and suddenly several decades worth of security research is obsolete? .....yeah, I'm gonna call bullshit. Compiling code or "running in a sandbox" does not stop attackers from breaking into your system. Might slow them down for a few months while they develop some new attacks.

Re: Announcing WCGI: WebAssembly and CGI

#17

Post by switchbak »

ex3ndr wrote: post #15
syrusakbary wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yup, via Java Applets. But they were a pain to use, that's why I intentionally wrote "seamlessly" :P

GWT allowed to run it without applets, also much more efficient than any current stack (since they dont support closure compiler)

I spent years working with GWT, it's not nearly as simple as you describe. It's not running "Java" in the browser, it's compiling down (a subset of) Java to Javascript.

That said, GWT was ahead of its time in a lot of ways, but it had warts galore.

Re: Announcing WCGI: WebAssembly and CGI

#18

Post by samstave »

syrusakbary wrote: post #8
la_fayette wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 (…

Im going to ask a very ignorant question ;;

Is it possible to spin-up a 'container' or whatever youre calling the VM of a site, for each individual user? So if you have a high security req on data accessible by computers, you spin up an individual container of said site that only serves that user, and is destroyed on exit... so that whatever the user does cannot affect others?

ELI5?

Re: Announcing WCGI: WebAssembly and CGI

#19

Post by evntdrvn »

The amount (and evolution) of acronyms in the WASM space is kinda overwhelming so I might be out to lunch…

At the top of the article it says “…compiling them to WASI”, but is that a semantically/technically correct statement? My understanding would be more that it should say something like “compiling them to WASI-compliant WASM” or something. Or can you actually “compile to WASI”

Re: Announcing WCGI: WebAssembly and CGI

#20

Post by pjmlp »

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…

It is incredible how with so much Java hate, the WASM folks are doing their best to replicate everything we had in 2005.
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