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0 pointslxgr2y ago0 comments

Seems like you’re jumping from “I didn’t ask for it” to “nobody asked for it”.

What if you want to run your unmodified executable on various architectures?

The JVM kind of does that, but not nearly every language can compile to that as a target, and if you want WASM-like sandboxing you need to deal with security managers, which is no fun at all (and I’ve never seen it done successfully for any non-Java software).

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dartos2y ago

When I’ve tried writing programs targeting wasm (in assemblyscript and rust) and platforms for them to run on, special care had to be taken to treat each language differently (how they encode strings differently for example.)

This means that not only do I need to take special care that my code can compile to wasm, but the platform devs (also me, in this case) needs to take special care to support a variety of different design choices in various wasm toolchains.

I’d rather just use SELinux containers and let the OS handle security.

Maybe Firecracker VMs like AWS lambda does.

lxgrOP2y ago

That's of course an option if you're fine with your deployables being architecture- and OS-dependent, and very often that's the case.

But for when it's not, I think a platform-independent and language-agnostic bytecode standard is a valuable thing to have.

dartos2y ago

In the extreme scenario where you want to run arbitrary untrusted code on arbitrary machines, that would be useful, but wasm isn’t a solution for that.

If I need to specifically support how certain languages compile to wasm (meaning I don’t support arbitrary wasm) then what’s the point?

It’s just Java applets again.

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse

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dartos2y ago

I’d rather just use SELinux containers and let the OS handle security.

Maybe Firecracker VMs like AWS lambda does.

lxgrOP2y ago

That's of course an option if you're fine with your deployables being architecture- and OS-dependent, and very often that's the case.

But for when it's not, I think a platform-independent and language-agnostic bytecode standard is a valuable thing to have.

dartos2y ago

In the extreme scenario where you want to run arbitrary untrusted code on arbitrary machines, that would be useful, but wasm isn’t a solution for that.

If I need to specifically support how certain languages compile to wasm (meaning I don’t support arbitrary wasm) then what’s the point?

It’s just Java applets again.

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse