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The Road to the WASM Component Model 1.0

bytecodealliance.org

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Re: The Road to the WASM Component Model 1.0

#21

Post by yjftsjthsd-h »

simonw wrote: post #2

I'm unreasonably excited about WASI. WASI is the thing which takes WebAssembly from a tool for running stuff in a browser to a tool that can run entire portable sandboxed applications on a computer - with controlled filesystem and network access. I don't ever want to run untrusted code from the internet outside of a sandbox ever again. If WASI lives up to its full potential I won't have to - we'll have a robust, cros…

Hey, this is also my interest. I was just looking into whether it was possible to e.g. build an archive extractor that runs like a normal program but does the actual extraction completely in wasm. Unfortunately, AFAICT it's possible but requires custom code; you can't (yet, I hope) just compile unzip/libarchive/whatever with CC=wasicompiler and get a sandboxed binary. But we're getting close.

Re: The Road to the WASM Component Model 1.0

#22

Post by fla »

wyager wrote: post #13
simonw wrote: post #2

I'm unreasonably excited about WASI. WASI is the thing which takes WebAssembly from a tool for running stuff in a browser to a tool that can run entire portable sandboxed applications on a computer - with controlled filesystem and network access. I don't ever want to run untrusted code from the internet outside of a sandbox ever again. If WASI lives up to its full potential I won't have to - we'll have a robust, cros…

I'm curious if people have a good story for why WASI will succeed where Java failed

My main one is: distribution & access. If major browsers implement the WASI runtime then using and distributing a WASI app will be way simpler than the Java equivalent ever was.

Re: The Road to the WASM Component Model 1.0

#23

Post by hobofan »

rvz wrote: post #19
Panzerschrek wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't ever want to run untrusted code from the internet outside of a sandbox ever again WASM is great, but I think it's a wrong approach for sandboxing problem. It's technically possible to sandbox native applications (compiled into target machine code) using OS-builtin mechanisms, but it's not done for compatibility reasons, because this is the way things were done last 50 years or so.

Exactly. It is entirely a misconception to believe that WASM is this silver bullet on sandboxing and it is not that great security-wise I’m afraid. It is only now being inspected by researchers and attackers who have found sandbox escapes [0] (chrome 0day), out-of-bounds [1] / use-after-free [2] and many other [3] flaws [4] in WebAssembly which I also agree that it is not enough for sandboxing at all. [0] https://nvd…

Those are not flaws in WASM itself, but in different WASM runtimes.

Re: The Road to the WASM Component Model 1.0

#25

Post by flohofwoe »

> The Component Model can’t formally reach 1.0 without native implementation in at least two browser engines.

I don't quite understand why the Component Model is now suddenly a browser thing, and on top something that needs to be implemented natively in browsers instead of a convention between different compiler toolchains.

Keep that boondoggle in WASI and the Bytecode Alliance. WASM in the browser works just fine without the added runtime complexity.

Re: The Road to the WASM Component Model 1.0

#26

Post by Deukhoofd »

shevy-java wrote: post #5

WASM first appeared in 2017. It still hasn't really reached a breakthrough. Billions use HTML+CSS+JavaScript. Who really uses WASM? There are of course users, but very, very few in absolute numbers. Many projects are not web-based really. For Autodesk Fusion, as one example for many, I have some mega-slow application that takes forever to work with in some cases on my laptop (it is not the fastest laptop, but I recen…

When I last played with it checking out its capabilities, I found the thing I was mostly missing to really make use of it was the thing referenced in this article, the Component Model. Without a type model and binary specifications, interop was made a lot harder than it'd have been otherwise. Now that that's in, it becomes a lot more useful.

I was mostly looking at it for its state as being a cross-platform supported output platform of bytecode that's fairly well sandboxed. That makes it an excellent target for things like running untrusted plugins in an application in a performant manner.

Re: The Road to the WASM Component Model 1.0

#27

Post by flohofwoe »

thefounder wrote: post #4

It’s great we are past the “wasm is not replacing JavaScript” phase. Or “you don’t need DOM for wasm . That’s what JavaScript is for”

I'm pretty sure you'll will still need a JS shim to talk to most web APIs. For instance the Mozilla DOM experiments seems to use a special JS variant with a 'use component' header (similar to the old 'use asm' for asm.js) as shim, but the JS shim is still there. The component model can marshal 'record types' between different WASM modules, but AFAIK not between a WASM module and a web API.

Re: The Road to the WASM Component Model 1.0

#28

Post by DanielHB »

simonw wrote: post #2

I'm unreasonably excited about WASI. WASI is the thing which takes WebAssembly from a tool for running stuff in a browser to a tool that can run entire portable sandboxed applications on a computer - with controlled filesystem and network access. I don't ever want to run untrusted code from the internet outside of a sandbox ever again. If WASI lives up to its full potential I won't have to - we'll have a robust, cros…

Use cases I am more excited about:

1) Replace webhooks in web apps with wasm binaries provided by the customer, but that run in the web app servers.

2) Safer plugin system for professional software (plugins for photoshop, plugins for IDEs, etc)

3) Safer mod system for games and server-side mods that run on the game-maker server.

Re: The Road to the WASM Component Model 1.0

#29

Post by enos_feedler »

jauntywundrkind wrote: post #10
enos_feedler wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It works in the browser already: https://github.com/bytecodealliance/jco

It works in the browser already, by bundling another browser runtime engine into wasm. You need a whole fork of Mozilla's SpiderMonkey engine, compiled to wasm, running in whatever browser you have, to run wasm components today. I confess I was quite frustrated at first when browsers all said no to wasi / wasm components. But honestly, it was the right call. It's taken so long to make wasm components happen, to get t…

I agree with you, but sadly without killer use cases in the browser this still ends up being quite political to adopt. I feel good about the approach being taken. The browser vendors have analytics on the usage of JCO and so despite it not being "ideal", it works. We need to make stuff using JCO and make those things popular. It's not on the browser vendors to build native component model yet. At some point I suspect it will be though.

Re: The Road to the WASM Component Model 1.0

#30

Post by pjmlp »

tancop wrote: post #14
Panzerschrek wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't ever want to run untrusted code from the internet outside of a sandbox ever again WASM is great, but I think it's a wrong approach for sandboxing problem. It's technically possible to sandbox native applications (compiled into target machine code) using OS-builtin mechanisms, but it's not done for compatibility reasons, because this is the way things were done last 50 years or so.

sandboxing native apps just gives you security. with wasm you also get a single portable binary that can run on x86 windows, arm64 linux and in your browser with zero modification. you dont need to write platform specific code or use third party frameworks.

No you don't, because WASM is only compute, and you need exactly runtime specific code and third party frameworks for everything else as imported functions.
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