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Comment by nikki93 | Hacker News Reader

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?

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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.

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