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WASM will replace containers

creston.blog

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Re: WASM will replace containers

#42

Post by paulgb »

> WebAssembly is a true write-once-run-anywhere experience. (Anywhere that can spin up a V8 engine, which is a lot of places these days.)

This is true if your wasm code is purely computational, but if it interacts with the outside world it’s a different story. Each V8 runtime has a subtly different interface, so code that runs on cloudflare V8 might not run in Bun or Deno. Not to mention if you want to support WASI too, which is a different set of bindings even though it’s still WebAssembly.

Love or hate Docker, part of its success was that POSIX was already a fairly established standard and there weren’t a lot of vendors driving it in different directions.

Re: WASM will replace containers

#45

Post by h0l0cube »

> You can compile several languages into WebAssembly already. Languages that can't be compiled will eventually have their own interpreters compiled to WebAssembly.

A big constraint here is the memory model. Languages include a specification for memory allocation, deallocation, lifetime and garbage collection, and WASM has it's own way of going about that that is engine dependent. The performance lost from reimplementing the memory model within WASM could only be regained by going back to something that looks like containers.

Re: WASM will replace containers

#47

Post by octopoc »

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…

Blazor is stable and extremely easy to use. It’s just a little slow to load, although there are ways to mitigate that.

Re: WASM will replace containers

#49

Post by lylejantzi3rd »

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.

The Orca project is attempting to do exactly that: https://github.com/orca-app/orca

Re: WASM will replace containers

#50

Post by chambers »

I found WASM slower than expected. I wrote some WASM logic functions recently which I thought would perform better than their native JS equivalent. For example, take a large array and "pivot" it in 10ms instead of a 100ms.

What I found was the JS version was a bit faster than the compiled WAT. Yikes.

EDIT: I think I'll try debugging it more

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