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

211–220 of 371 posts

Re: WASM will replace containers

#211

Post by kryptiskt »

In practice the problem containers solve is to bundle an application with its environment so that it will work the same on the developers machine and in production and in five years time when the servers are replaced with new ones running another distro.

The WASM world doesn't have most of the pieces of that puzzle and WASM itself is quite irrelevant. Say we standardized on a sandbox running x86_64 VMs under Firecracker, with the proper sandboxing that would work just as well as running WASM. You might say that WASM is portable, x86_64 assembler is not, to that I would counter that ARM (and probably RISC-V too) can emulate x86_64 faster than they can run WASM. So what's the point of the WASM piece of the puzzle?

Re: WASM will replace containers

#212

Post by hnlmorg »

hardwaresofton wrote: post #174
danpalmer wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I understand your point but sadly I think it's too idealistic (not that we shouldn't strive for these goals). We already have those sorts of tests for browsers, and browser compatibility is still a problem. We have acceptance tests for other areas, like Android's CTS tests, but there are still incompatibilities. That also assumes that everyone involved wants compatibility, and that's unlikely. Imagine a world where e…

> I understand your point but sadly I think it's too idealistic (not that we shouldn't strive for these goals). We already have those sorts of tests for browsers, and browser compatibility is still a problem. We have acceptance tests for other areas, like Android's CTS tests, but there are still incompatibilities. > I think the browser problem is a marketshare/market power problem, and Wasm doesn't have that problem.…

> I think the browser problem is a marketshare/market power problem, and Wasm doesn't have that problem.

No, it really isn’t.

For more than the last two decades every browser bar IE looked towards compatibility and only included differences as browser-specific extensions.

And even when Microsoft eventually caved and started the Edge project to create a compatible browser, they ended up admitting defeat and pivoted to Chromium themselves.

Re: WASM will replace containers

#214

Post by pjmlp »

moribvndvs wrote: post #93

One benefit of being an old engineer is watching how excited people get when they rediscover something that has gone around the bend over and over again. I swear if you fuckers reinvent DCOM I will shit in your hats.

Actually it is more like CORBA, powered by RMI.

Re: WASM will replace containers

#215

Post by pjmlp »

invalidname wrote: post #119
moribvndvs wrote: post #93

One benefit of being an old engineer is watching how excited people get when they rediscover something that has gone around the bend over and over again. I swear if you fuckers reinvent DCOM I will shit in your hats.

Exactly. It's like the JVM circa 2004. Without all the observability and features we have today and half the performance/reliability/security.

We had them, Java EE application servers had all of that available, as did CLR/IIS, or IBM AS/400 for that matter, really we have seen it before.

Re: WASM will replace containers

#217

Post by udev4096 »

Containers are not going away anytime soon. I feel like this is nothing but a clickbait post. There are crazy amounts of innovations happening in the CNI space, such as bootc, katacontainers, etc. Hundreds of CNCF projects (envoy and istio just from top of my mind) are being used world wide which mostly have built upon k8s. Why do you think they would stop to use an immature runtime whose goal isn't even the same as containers?

Re: WASM will replace containers

#218

Post by udev4096 »

p12tic wrote: post #170
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…

Container security boundary can be much stronger if one wants. One can use something like https://github.com/google/gvisor as a container runtime for podman or docker. It's a good hybrid between VMs and containers. The container is put into sort of VM via kvm, but it does not supply a kernel and talks to a fake one. This means that security boundary is almost as strong as VM, but mostly everything will work like in a…

gVisor is solid but it comes with a perf hit. Plus, it does not work on every image

Re: WASM will replace containers

#219

Post by pjmlp »

milesrout wrote: post #146
otterley wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> When are we actually getting this future? Around the same time Linux is ready for the desktop.

Unlikely as that was whenever you stopped having to write Xorg.conf by hand, ie the mid 2000s.

As long as, people use their computers as PC towers from 2000, without hardware video decoding, sleep states, modern UEFI features.

There is naturally the version that works, keeping the Linux kernel, and replacing the userland with managed language frameworks, I have heard they are making a huge success in mobile devices and throwaway laptops.

Re: WASM will replace containers

#220

Post by pjmlp »

dustbunny wrote: post #87
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…

Emscripten seems pretty stable and easy to use to me?

Still not as easy a C++/CLI in .NET, in terms of tooling.
Post reply on HN