Comment by DanielHB

6 days ago

Use cases I am more excited about:

1) Replace webhooks in web apps with wasm binaries provided by the customer, but that run in the web app servers.

2) Safer plugin system for professional software (plugins for photoshop, plugins for IDEs, etc)

3) Safer mod system for games and server-side mods that run on the game-maker server.

12 comments

DanielHB

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bzzzt  6 days ago

We had that in the 90's with Java. Why would this approach succeed today?

  • simonw  6 days ago

    Why wouldn't it? It's a different technology stack, developed with the benefit of decades of additional experience running hostile code on the web.

    • pjmlp  6 days ago

      You mean like the CLR?

      Kind of strange that such experience still allows for WASM to be the target of C and C++ compilers, and there is no bounds checking support inside linear memory regions.

  • DanielHB  6 days ago

    WASM sandbox is miles better than the JVM

    WASI is a standard on where to poke holes on the sandbox for your specific use-case

    WASM+WASI as a compilation target allows any program written for modern operating systems to work on any WASM runtime

crabmusket  6 days ago

Check out https://extism.org, it is built for those kinds of use cases. However I think WASI and components could enhance it.

  • DanielHB  6 days ago

    sorry I meant "most excited about", WASI and components should be useful for the usecases I mentioned too.

    For example a SaaS services that accepts WASM plugins could provide a WASI that lets the plugin write to a object-store filesystem (like AWS S3) provided by the SaaS owner.