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

311–320 of 371 posts

Re: WASM will replace containers

#311

Post by algorithmsRcool »

zfg wrote: post #195
algorithmsRcool wrote: post #64

I just don't see it. WASM requires throwing away all the decades of x86/ARM compiler work in ecosystems like Java, .NET and C++ and placing all trust in the WASM runtime/V8 to perform as well as them.

It's doesn't. It's just another compilation target along side x86 and ARM and friends.

Yes, but now you are going through another translation (aka V8) layer in order to get down to x86 or ARM. You just have to hope that the optimizer of this translation layer is at least as smart as what you had before.

Re: WASM will replace containers

#312

Post by bovermyer »

kentonv wrote: post #308
bovermyer wrote: post #286

It's mentioned in passing in the article, but I'm intrigued by the author's mention of how Cloudflare Workers interoperate. Besides the official documentation, are there any articles anyone can recommend on this topic?

Cloudflare Workers run in V8 isolates, which are much lighter-weight than containers, with the ability to run thousands in the same process, and start up new ones quickly on-demand. For Cloudflare it's usually easier to start your application on the machine where it is requested, than to try to route to a machine where it's already running: https://developers.cloudflare.com/workers/reference/how-work... The API const…

Interesting. I only have a single Worker, but maybe I should experiment more with them.

Thank you!!

Re: WASM will replace containers

#313

Post by orliesaurus »

evacchi wrote: post #284
orliesaurus wrote: post #11

lol I initially thought dylibso was the author, I was mistaken. That being said - WASM has been steadily improving over time, yet it hasn't quite achieved mainstream adoption. I'm curious what's holding it back? It seems like despite its technical advancements, WASM hasn't captured the public's interest in the same way some other technologies have. Perhaps it's a lack of easily accessible learning resources, or maybe…

> lol I initially thought dylibso was the author as a Dylibso employee, I am wondering what made you think that :D at Dylibso we advocate for Wasm for software extensions, rather than an alternative to containers!

Because of the topic. I find you guys are the only people advocating for Wasm in general, in public.

Re: WASM will replace containers

#314

Post by stackskipton »

sebstefan wrote: post #281
stackskipton wrote: post #83

As PlatformOps (formerly DevOps (formerly SRE (formerly Ops))), either this was hilarious satire or ChatGPT Ketamine trip. I'm not sure. > In the year 2030, no one will remember Kubernetes. So what's going to handle out rolling out new versions of your WASM, setting up whatever Reverse Proxy you pick and other stuff involved getting. A bunch of scripts you wrote to do this for you? https://www.macchaffee.com/blog/202…

WASM is powering Cloudflare workers in pretty much the fashion the guy describes and it does solve the problem of big latencies for cold starts with Lambda stuff Instead of spinning up a container on-demand you spin up what is essentially a chrome tab in your V8 instance. Startup time is nil In terms of solutions looking for a problem, that one seems to have fixed at least one problem for at least one person It's pre…

WASM has select uses. Cold startups for functions is one of them and glad Cloudflare was able to use it.

I however don't have that problem. Every environment I've been in has banished Lambdas for most things because writing ourselves into knots to keep the lambdas going wasn't worth just having a small container listening to SQS/Kafka was easier and if we needed to scale, we could.

Re: WASM will replace containers

#315

Post by npodbielski »

Stevvo wrote: post #141
LeFantome wrote: post #99

WASM does not run on real hardware. At best, WASM can be considered a virtual machine (in the way that the JVM and the .NET CLR are virtual machines). I guess we can call that a "runtime". Containers package applications that run directly on real hardware (well, directly on a real kernel that is running on real hardware). There is no runtime. I am talking OCI containers here (Docker and Kubernetes). At least they can…

WASM can run on real hardware. e.g. innative.dev

Seems kinda dead. Last release 2 years ago and last commit nine months.

Re: WASM will replace containers

#316

Post by afiori »

pjmlp wrote: post #221
hardwaresofton wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wasm is getting merged in and designed in a way that it is "drop in". As in, the standard libs are written to do WASI calls instead of libc (or whatever else) for standard I/O concerns. This is represented in some languages better than others -- for many languages you just switch the "target" -- from x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu to wasm32-wasip2 (ex. Rust). Some things won't work, but most/many will (simple file access,…

Basically CORBA with RMI and .NET Remoting.

Yep, once something failed nothing with any similarity to it will ever go anywhere

Re: WASM will replace containers

#317

Post by afiori »

trescenzi wrote: post #26
jagged-chisel wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> … it can't replace the encapsulation. Can you explain your thoughts here? WebAssembly is sandboxed and effort must be expended to provide a mechanism for getting data through that boundary. How does that differ from “encapsulation?”

I'm referring to a different kind of encapsulation. Dependencies, tools, version management, configurations, environment variables, etc. Even if you can fully compile your code into WASM and host it on V8 you need to ship it with configuration files, set specific environment variables and so on. Containers allow you to bundle all of that together into a single unit you can share with others.

That would be handled by the equivalent of a dockerfile/docker-compose.yml,

Re: WASM will replace containers

#318

Post by afiori »

bocahtie wrote: post #52

I'm always reminded of Gary Bernhardt's "the birth and death of javascript" when wasm gets discussed. While it's a bit tongue-in-cheek, I think it really drives home that it's really just another layer of abstraction that may or may not be useful for a given problem, and might not be the silver bullet that anyone is looking for. I recon that whether or not wasm will take over everything will mostly be about trade off…

This for sure, eg it will never be commonplace to run posgres compiled to wasm.

Most instances of "X will eat the world" and "X will be used anywhere" will be false even for very successful technologies

Re: WASM will replace containers

#319

Post by mixmastamyk »

pjmlp wrote: post #219
milesrout wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

All these work well on our devices, old and new. Y2K wants its talking points back.

Re: WASM will replace containers

#320

Post by afiori »

weinzierl wrote: post #244

Statically compiled portable binaries will replace containers. Maybe not, but one can dream at least. What do we need containers for, if we can build a service in a binary that you can throw on any Linux of the past 20 years and it just starts to serve network requests? What do we need to support other platforms if the server world is one big Linux monoculture and the next best platforms are just a cross-compile away…

Statically linked binaries are perfect to run in lightweight containers
Post reply on HN