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0 pointsdanpalmer1y ago0 comments

Well, not quite, that's an oversimplification. As I mentioned I think there's a place for WASM as the common unit of business logic, for things like plugins.

Implementing a FaaS runtime like Lambda is actually quite hard to do in a way that is both safe and multi-language. Compiling down to a safe, sandboxed bytecode, is not a bad idea, regardless of whether you're doing that to run it in a user's browser, or to run a FaaS function on some cloud infra, or to write a server-side plugin to a SaaS product.

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verdverm1y ago

This is what CUE is exploring for WASM, the ability to have custom functions or plugins that can be shipped with modules and run anywhere. It will be super cool, but they are blocked on upstream changes to the WASM runtime

TZubiri1y ago

Yeah sure, there was a time people believed that about javascript, and node.js ended up being a tool used to build website middle-ends and BFF to connect to actual backends.

The user's device which can be a smartphone or a latpop and the developer's device which can be a 24 hour online server or a 24 hour online server, are just two completely different devices that cannot be abstracted away.

WASM is a technology that was born for the frontend, and js was a technology that was born for the frontend, you can for sure metastasize the web front towards the back, but then you end up with a web bias in the frontend (why not make the backend in swift, or Java for phones?, or whatever language will be used for new tech like LLM voice assistants?) and of course a frontend bias in the backend.

Not a good look, let's stop it with the full stack thing, let's specialize, half of use do backend, half of you do frontend, and then we keep on specializing, if everyone does everything we'll cover no ground.

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