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

251–260 of 371 posts

Re: WASM will replace containers

#251

Post by tecleandor »

SEJeff wrote: post #184
josephg wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

True, but I suspect it'll be a lot easier to virtualise all those APIs through WASM than it is for a regular native binary. I mean, half the point of docker is that all syscalls are routed into an LXD container with its own filesystem and network. It should be pretty easy to do the same thing in userland with a wasm runtime. And the nice thing about that is you can pick which environment a wasm bundle runs in. Want t…

docker and lxd are competing projects. Docker does not use lxd to launch containers. lxd was written by the lead dev (at canonical) of lxc which was not as polished as docker but sort of kind of did the same thing (ran better chroots) They both use Linux kernel features such as control groups and namespaces. When put together this is referred to as a container but the kernel has zero concept of “a container”.

Docker started using an LXC driver to run workloads, but it was deprecated 10 years ago. No LXC remaining there :P

Re: WASM will replace containers

#252

Post by bzzzt »

lmm wrote: post #250
not2b wrote: post #13

"The main thing holding back wider adoption is a lack of system interfaces. File access, networking, etc. But it's just a matter of time before these features get integrated." But then you've got to figure out and prevent all the security holes that can be introduced by adding file access, networking, etc. That's what killed the Java write-once, run-anywhere promise. Maybe put the whole thing into a container? Oops,…

Java write once run anywhere is fine. Java people don't generally bother with containers because there's no point, the JVM already solves the same problem.

Almost all modern Java frameworks specifically target Docker containers in the cloud.

Re: WASM will replace containers

#253

Post by hardwaresofton »

hnlmorg wrote: post #236
hardwaresofton wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe I'm just not understanding, but I'm not sure how this precludes it being a marketshare problem -- the thing is that the marketshare leader doesn't have to worry about compatibility/being interoperable. > 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. This can be interpreted as a problem of m…

IE hasn’t been the market share leader in a long time and couldn’t even retain compatibility with itself, let alone any ACID tests nor wider formalised standards. And these days the problem is simply that the specifications are so complex and fail mode so forgiving that it’s almost impossible for two different implementations to output entirely the same results across every test suite. Neither of these are market lea…

fair point -- I meant the IE -> Chrome shift skipped over a world where more browsers held more equal share.

Agree on the other points though, market share is clearly not the only problem!

Re: WASM will replace containers

#255

Post by zfg »

pjmlp wrote: post #230
zfg wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How else am I supposed to use a Visual Basic 6 clone written in C# in my browser? https://bandysc.github.io/AvaloniaVisualBasic6/ https://github.com/BAndysc/AvaloniaVisualBasic6 WebAssembly brings all languages to the browser and that's a good thing. I can write applications for the desktop in any language, I should be able to do the same thing in the browser. WebAssembly makes that possible.

Back in the day you would have used .NET plugin for browsers, which got replaced by Silverlight plugin, nowadays it is WebAssembly, really nothing new per se.

Except that it's implemented in all browsers with nothing extra to install.

All third party browser plugins failed eventually.

Re: WASM will replace containers

#257

Post by zfg »

aqueueaqueue wrote: post #242
zfg wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How else am I supposed to use a Visual Basic 6 clone written in C# in my browser? https://bandysc.github.io/AvaloniaVisualBasic6/ https://github.com/BAndysc/AvaloniaVisualBasic6 WebAssembly brings all languages to the browser and that's a good thing. I can write applications for the desktop in any language, I should be able to do the same thing in the browser. WebAssembly makes that possible.

Minified JS also makes that possible.

WebAssembly does it better.

Re: WASM will replace containers

#258

Post by cess11 »

Can I run ephemeral Oracle databases and JBoss instances and Tibco EMS as WASM as part of a CI/CD flow? No? Then it's not comparable to containers.

I sure hope "developing on Cloudflare" is not "what the future looks like".

There are many, many VM:s and programming languages that are more or less easy to compile to many architectures and/or possible to run straight on a hypervisor or metal. JavaScript, Python, Lua, V, and so on. None of them are seen as container competitors.

Re: WASM will replace containers

#260

Post by pjmlp »

zfg wrote: post #255
pjmlp wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Back in the day you would have used .NET plugin for browsers, which got replaced by Silverlight plugin, nowadays it is WebAssembly, really nothing new per se.

Except that it's implemented in all browsers with nothing extra to install. All third party browser plugins failed eventually.

And now we have all plugins back, that is the only utility for WebAssembly, doing two level translation of bytecodes.
Post reply on HN