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Comment by brian_herman | Hacker News Reader

What we should be comparing it is to activeX and flash will it have the security that those two technologies didn't?

Yes, because it's learned from their experience. WASM has been designed with security in mind from the very start, and implemented by experienced browser teams with a very deep understanding of the security risks of doing so.

"Usenix Security '20-Everything Old Is New Again: Binary Security of WebAssembly"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=glL__xjviro

"The Security Risk of Lacking Compiler Protection in WebAssembly"

https://arxiv.org/abs/2111.01421

WASM uses the browser sandbox, from what I understand it re-uses the same facilities that browsers use for JIT

WASM's sandboxing as implemented in practice is different from JITs. It works by allocating a 4GB region of virtual memory and treating the base address as NULL. Pointers in WASM are 32 bit so they are unable to point outside the region.

The big win is the runtime doesn't need to check pointers for validity. However there are some downsides relative to native code:

1. Can't address more than 4GB of memory

2. Can't be efficiently implemented on 32 bit systems

3. Can't share memory between WASM modules

4. NULL dereferences don't trap (I think)

I would not be surprised if future CPUs had hardware support for this stuff, e.g. load/stores with a mask to confine the pointers.

The other way it ensures isolation is by separating code and data. All executable code lives in a separate address space that is not accessible from within wasm. Call stack is also a separate area, making it impossible to muck around or even look at the return pointer. Function pointers are opaque - they can live in global or local variables and in table entries (which are also completely separate from memory), but not in memory; when one needs such a pointer as part of the data structure (e.g. vtables), an index into a table is used instead.

Neat. I thought Web pages were limited to 2 GB memory. I guess tines have changed.

Just like Solaris SPARC has been doing like for 10 years.

One of the things that killed Flash was not being supported on iOS while Wasm runs fine (and actually pretty well!) on iOS which is pretty good for reach.

On the other side, not being able to run on iOS didn't kill any server side language (think Java.) And Java client side (Android) is very different from Java server side, down to the sets of developers.

Currently WASM is both a client side and server side runtime. It's not clear where it will be in 5 or 10 years. I don't see a compelling server side story. Why WASM and not C#, Java, Node, Python, Rails (I intentionally don't write Ruby) or whatever any of us is using now with its standard runtime?

> Why WASM and not C#, Java, Node, Python, Rails (I intentionally don't write Ruby) or whatever any of us is using now with its standard runtime?

I don't understand why you use a framework instead of a language there, but it seems to be in the same category of mistake as asking “why <compilation target> and not <thing that can be compiled to that target>”. They aren't mutually exclusive alternatives.

In a phase: code sharing.

Say you are a C# developer and there is a C / C++ / Rust thing you want to use as a dependency.

Well, WASM is your interop layer. Same with Node.js, Deno, Go etc. You can start to share alot more code with a solid interop layer that WASM presents.

Just like CLR has been doing for 20 years.

IBM and Unisys almost since the 1960's, depending on which model we are talking about.

wasm does not have a solid interop layer, especially compared to past attempts such as CLR. What you get at the moment is more or less the C FFI, but more awkward to use because of the sandbox.

Personally I'm not super familiar with its benefits if any on the server and would actually not use it on the server myself and just build binaries directly, probably using Go. But I've seen some references to Wasm on the serverside for something similar to containerization or loading plugins. It does seem less obvious to me than the client side.

What makes you say Wasm is a server side runtime / imply that it's meant to be one?

With go as an example, you know the saying “cgo isn’t go”? Well, you could use C, C++, Rust or anything else that compiles to wasm from any other language.

There have been a few people who say if wasm (WASI on the server) existed already, Docker wouldn’t need to exist. Docker runs a whole OS just to run your binary - imagine the benefits of Docker but just running your binary.

It’s all early days so I am slightly waving my hands, but a lot of this works now. Check out _wasmtime_.

For the client I use a simple go -> c++ compiler I wrote and compile to wasm from that actually, on my side projects. It had zero overhead interfacing to / calls to C/C++ (including generics<->templates) since it's just generating that. Example web game made with that: https://github.com/nikki93/raylib-5k

I think I've seen wasmtime before. If I needed to interface to any C/C++ things on the server I would probably just write in C/C++ (or Gx) yeah.

iOS was the final nail in the coffin, but Flash had been having years of an endless flood of severe security problems. It was having major problems hanging on prior to Apple playing their hand.

Losing Flash's excellent authoring tools is still a hard blow though.

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