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Comment by y4mi | Hacker News Reader

To my knowledge (correct me if I'm wrong please), the performance issues from WASM only exist in the context of moving things back into the DOM. I was always of the understanding that WASM itself is super performant and if it's possible to run a WASM application without going through the DOM you'd get native performance, making it a valid choice for things like gaming.

Most devs would obviously still use unreal engine etc, but these engines will be able to give you improved performance of your games by utilizing WASM

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WASM gets you faster performance than JavaScript, sure, but it's not native, either. Sandboxing & byte code aren't free to have. See the extremely long history of existing byte code VMs here - WASM isn't really doing anything new.

Modern hypervisors have astonishing performance, and I don’t see why Chrome and Safari wouldn’t manage to eventually provide a similarly efficient implementation.

Modern hypervisors don't run bytecode and are using the CPU to do security enforcement, not software emulating it like WASM is forced to do (since it's not using a hardware protection domain, aka a process)

WASM is more secure than a hypervisor, since it prevents code injection.

It is trivial to modify function pointers, implemented as indirect calls and "read-only" data in wasm.

Yes, WASM in combination with an unsafe language is less secure than memory safe languages, but more secure than a hypervisor. You can also use WASM with a memory safe language.

It doesn't matter if it's rust or not. You can still modify read only data and still redirect indirect calls. You can still modify the stack and the heap. Rust changes nothing.

Also, not sure where the comparison to a hypervisor is coming into play. As @kllrnohj mentioned hypervisors are relying on actual hardware.

I'm not a rust expert, but I thought rust without unsafes should prevent such things at the compile time. C# and Java will be compiled into WASM differently, I believe no less securely than JVM or .NET. Having information leaks is still better than arbitrary code execution.

No safe language in the world prevents anything if the attacker can change the binary contents, it is no longer the code produced by the compiler.

That is why we have signed binary execution to start with, WASM doesn't support any of this.

WASM is less secure than a regular process boundary, and far less secure than a hypervisor. I'm not sure where you're getting this from? Things like spectre mitigations in CPUs are not doing anything for the likes of WASM, after all, they only target process & ring boundaries. It's why you have to enable COOP and COEP to use thread with WASM - because the security for WASM's threads comes from the CPU enforcing process boundaries, not from WASM's sandbox.

If we are concerned with leakage of user data available in your own web program, then unsafe WASM code is more secure than unsafe code in a hypervisor because it prevents RCE, which results in full control of the hypervisor environment, which also enables transient attacks against the host environment, if there are vulnerabilities in your hypervisor (previously hypervisors had to be patched for Spectre). If we are talking about host platform protection against arbitrary malicious code, information leakage from neighboring processes/tabs, WASM is no different from a process boundary, at least in chrome, because that's how it's implemented. It's an implementation detail independent of WASM. Could as well be implemented with hardware virtualization, but it would make interfacing with browser APIs more expensive, probably to the point of impracticality.

Are you trying to say that code compiled with CFI is less vulnerable than code that wasn't? In which case sure, but that's entirely orthogonal to WASM. Code inside WASM isn't otherwise inherently protected. Code reuse attacks via indirect calls are still possible, as are of course side channel attacks and data leaks.

And since WASM uses linear memory and lacks things like ASLR, the code in the sandbox cannot achieve the same level of protection it could if it was in a hypervisor.

No need for RCE when data corruption suffices to change code paths.

WASM was explicitly designed to be easy to into native code. No production-ready WASM runtime is interpreting bytecode in hot code paths.

Easy to convert to native code is very different from easy to convert to optimal native code. Just like WASM having performance as a design goal both doesn't mean they achieved it nor does it mean that it won when a compromise had to be made against other design goals like portability or security.

In fact I'm quite certain that whenever portability or security ran up against performance in WASM's design, that performance always lost. Those other two goals were definitely a higher priority for WASM's designers.

Stable, portable byte codes are always inherently lossy. Information that could be (and often is) useful to optimizers is lost in that conversion. Then the conversion from byte code to running code also is on the hot path - it's on the hot path of starting execution. This is the same problem existing byte code solutions face, like CLR & JVM. WASM didn't manage to magic a solution where nobody else had. It's the same thing that's been done to death, just with "web" slapped on the front of it & bundled in a browser. That part of "being in a browser" makes it interesting for web devs, sure, but in the broader context of "all of computing" it's... just not? It's what we already have had (and been using!) for decades.

For some server applications using WASM the biggest performance benefit is not really how fast it is running but how fast it is to start a new WASM instance compared to launching a new OS process.

However, I think it would be possible to make systems in which similar instances, because they are written in a type-safe, memory-safe language in the first place, could bypass WASM and both start up fast and run fast optimised code.

I have done some research on portable bytecodes, and have some novel ideas for getting more performance, but I agree that the inherent problem remains. One thing that help make optimised C/C++ fast is that optimisers assume that undefined behaviour doesn't get triggered. But in a system for portable code, you can't just assume - you'd have to prove that it can not exist to be able to do the same optimisations, and that is far from straightforward. And when it triggers, it has to work the same say, or it won't be portable (bug-compatible) between hardware.

AFAIK you don't really get native performance, although it's hard to find good data on this (https://nickb.dev/blog/wasm-and-native-node-module-performan... was one I could find on the fly). WASM is still virtual machine based and not compiled to a native executable so this is to be expected I guess, it's supposed to be faster than JS and it achieves that goal. Maybe it can be an alternative to Unity, which would be good enough for a lot of games, but I don't know how that compares.

> not compiled to a native executable

except it is, WASM is designed to be AOT compiled to native code.

Sure there is a bit of difference, WASM needs additional bounds checks and WASM also doesn't have all the info a more high level compiler has.

Now Unity is so much more then just a tool to make cross platform easier. So comparing it to WASM is kinda pointless IMHO. Though it probably is a grate choice for any extension mechanism, like mods or even in game scripting.

> except it is, WASM is designed to be AOT compiled to native code.

Interesting, I didn't know that. How does WASM handle different architectures? Do you build different binaries for x86/arm? Or does it do it the Apple way with the giant bundle that contains all binaries?

> Now Unity is so much more then just a tool to make cross platform easier. So comparing it to WASM is kinda pointless IMHO. Though it probably is a grate choice for any extension mechanism, like mods or even in game scripting.

Agreed, that was badly worded. Like you said, one could compare a module written in Unity and compiled to whatever Unity compiles to/is implemented in these days with a module in WASM.

Edit: Or does the AOT mean that the format that is shipped is some non-native format but the client compiles everything before the first run?

> How does WASM handle different architectures?

The same way JavaScript or C#/Java do. It's a bytecode format (typically the first stage in today's JavaScript engines is to turn into a bytecode), which the different engines then JIT for the OS and architecture they are running on.

For more details on a couple different engine implementations, you may find the below of interest.

- https://v8.dev/docs/wasm-compilation-pipeline

- https://hacks.mozilla.org/2020/10/a-new-backend-for-cranelif...

"designed for AOT" means it ships platform independent byte code, which is easy to turn into assembly/machine code before running it.

AOT is a counter part to JIT:

- AOT ahead of time (but still on the system, e.g. just before running)

- JIT just in time (while interpreting code you notice a hot section and turn it into native code)

So what most WASM runtime do is parse the WASM byte code, running certain checks for wellformedness and emit assembly (with necessary bounds checks, etc. to not escape the WASM sandbox).

This doesn't mean you can't interpret it, or interpret + JIT it, it's just that AOT seemed like a better choice then JIT or pure interpretation for WASM, as just interpreting it isn't fast enough compared to JavaScript JIT/or asm.js, to make it worth adding it to the web.

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