Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

WASM will replace containers

creston.blog

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–140 of 371 posts

Re: WASM will replace containers

#131

Post by shortrounddev2 »

danpalmer wrote: post #96

WASM solves a different problem to containers. Where WASM does well is in running sandboxed code efficiently, because that's where it started out. I think WASM will likely take over as the standard for shipping things like Functions-as-a-Service implementations, and other forms of plugins, where one host application/server of some kind wants to efficiently run pieces of untrusted logic. Containers don't solve that pr…

I think WASM will end up being more useful as a universal language VM on client machines than it will as a tool for browser computation

Re: WASM will replace containers

#132

Post by tombert »

mdaniel wrote: post #115
tombert wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm no wasm expert, but I find it just fantastically unlikely that they're going to beat the decades of research that have gone into the JIT in the JVM anytime soon Probably not, but that's sort of orthogonal to my point. Java started as "write once run anywhere", but it has almost become the opposite of that: "write once, run it on your specific server". "Portability" is not nearly the same concern with Java as it…

You say that, and yet for your cited Android apps, they are built using gradle, which is written for the JVM, or using Maven, which is written for the JVM, and likely even typed inside IntelliJ (aka Android Studio) which is written for the JVM. Also, this may be splitting hairs, but Android is actually dalvik, not the JVM

That's why I deliberately said "Java", not JVM (though I think dalvik has been deprecated and it's ART now).

I'm sure you can list any number of programs that are written in Java, but it certainly has not been the cross-platform standard that everyone was promised; it feels like Electron has more or less taken its mantle in the world of desktop land.

Re: WASM will replace containers

#133

Post by harrall »

hardwaregeek wrote: post #24

When? We’ve been talking about wasm for years. When are we actually getting this future? It’s been 8 years since wasm 1.0, and still we don’t have a stable, easy to use toolchain. Rust has maybe the best support and I still can’t get a basic async application with tokio to work on wasm. To put it into context, Rust was released in 2012. 8 years later it was stable, had a solid toolchain and plenty of people using it…

WASM is another VM and it reminds me of the difficulty that the JVM has faced. You can write-once-run-once a lot of languages like Ruby or JavaScript on the JVM and some of the runtimes are pretty good.

But the rest of the community prefers using the original implementation. If some library that you want to use doesn’t work, no one is going to help you. You’re using the second class implementation.

Re: WASM will replace containers

#134

Post by ogoffart »

tombert wrote: post #2

It would be so great if WASM gives us the paradise that Java promised thirty years ago. Being able to get fast, "write once, run anywhere" would be awesome. I wonder if someone could make a decent cross-platform GUI toolkit to save us from the horribly slow Electron-hell we've carved out for ourselves.

> I wonder if someone could make a decent cross-platform GUI toolkit to save us from the horribly slow Electron-hell we've carved out for ourselves.

https://github.com/slint-ui/slint

Re: WASM will replace containers

#138

Post by jdougan »

mikewarot wrote: post #97

Capabilities based Operating Systems will replace containers. WASM is a stepping stone to help the world better impedance match them conceptually. If someone tacks on file system access to WASM, the whole system becomes worthless.

A while back someone claimed to me that WASI was structured as capabilities. True/false?

Re: WASM will replace containers

#139

Post by koiueo »

tombert wrote: post #84
mdaniel wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We could name it the Abstract Window Toolkit and it would render the same on every platform. But then, someone would get butthurt about it having a "distinct look" and decide to make the Standard Widget Toolkit that uses native bindings. Fantastic that it stops that distinct look, with the small asterisk that you now have to ship .dll/.so/.dylib shims in your "cross platform" app I'm no wasm expert, but I find it jus…

> I'm no wasm expert, but I find it just fantastically unlikely that they're going to beat the decades of research that have gone into the JIT in the JVM anytime soon Probably not, but that's sort of orthogonal to my point. Java started as "write once run anywhere", but it has almost become the opposite of that: "write once, run it on your specific server". "Portability" is not nearly the same concern with Java as it…

> "write once, run it on your specific server".

Funny, how people forget that a "specific server" can be running Linux on bare metal ARM or a x86 container, or maybe Windows or even MacOS.

Re: WASM will replace containers

#140

Post by konaraddi »

danpalmer wrote: post #96

WASM solves a different problem to containers. Where WASM does well is in running sandboxed code efficiently, because that's where it started out. I think WASM will likely take over as the standard for shipping things like Functions-as-a-Service implementations, and other forms of plugins, where one host application/server of some kind wants to efficiently run pieces of untrusted logic. Containers don't solve that pr…

Cloudflare, Fastly, and Amex use WASM in their FaaS implementations
Post reply on HN