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Comment by s-lambert | Hacker News Reader

>pretty interesting ideas around WASM

I'm confused here, does WASM stand for something different besides WebAssembly because googling "kubernetes WASM' came up with nothing but WebAssembly. But I was under the impression that WebAssembly is just a virtual machine. I'm not much of a backend person but I don't see the overlap between container management (kubernetes) to a virtual machine (WASM).

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I meant more that technologies like WASM might obsolete the need for containers and thereby container orchestration platforms like Kubernetes. Of course Kubernetes might itself evolve to orchestrate WASM workloads.

I can already see it, a zip file containing application assets, a wasm binary and a couple of manifest files with configuration metadata.

Where have I seen this already?

Sure, superficially it sounds like Java. But hey, Java was really damn successful for a very long time.

It would help if that wasn't sold as something new never attempted before.

Of course Kubernetes might itself evolve to orchestrate WASM workloads.

Already been done:

https://krustlet.dev/

The WASM concept has been around for decades, it's effectively jvm or .net in but in the browser. I don't get the relevance when discussing k8s or containers.

WASM is not just in the browser, which is the key point. But yeah, it is superficially similar to the Java application servers of the past. One big difference is that I can compile, e.g., Rust to WASM but not JVM bytecode. WASM is language agnostic in a way that the JVM isn't. This makes it a good target for shipping apps in a variety of languages that just needs to be scheduled "somewhere", which is the main purpose of a container orchestration platforms like k8s. This is an evolution of serverless, where I won't have to maintain a "cluster" for my compute but just hand off a WASM binary to cloud provider.

Because its advocates now decided to reinvent JVM/.NET application containers.

https://krustlet.dev/

I thought WASM was just super-optimized JavaScript that lets you play Unreal in a web browser. Like

Am I thinking of a different tech? Is “WebAssembly” == WASM?

You’re thinking of ASM.js, a method of writing and optimizing JavaScript as a compile target for C. It involved a lot of |0 to force the VMs of the time to assume every number was a int32 instead of a float64. Firefox’s engine briefly used a special optimizer for asm.js but it’s just standard compliant JS.

WebAssembly is a new virtual machine that isn’t related to JavaScript. There’s no garbage collector or automatic memory management. It uses a binary compiled format for machine code instead of plain text. It’s kinda like Java if you replace the Java memory model with the C memory model, and the Java language with something that looks more like LLVM mashed up with Lisp.

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