I would add that it can be useful to have isolated runtimes even if you're not a PaaS. Say you need to parse an obscure file format that can be uploaded from untrusted users (and nowadays, that's all users). You've got some ancient C or C++ source code for the parser, but it hasn't been vetted for security or denial-of-service issues. Compile it to WASM, run it in an isolated runtime, and you can be confident that it won't be able to escape its sandbox while also minimizing startup times and using significantly fewer resources than needing a container for each invocation.

Thanks for that.

> Back to the future

> For those of you who have been around for the better part of the past couple of decades, you may notice this looks very similar to RFC3875, better known as CGI (The Common Gateway Interface). While our example here certainly does not conform to the specification, you can imagine how this can be extended to turn the stdin of a basic 'command line' application into a full-blown http handler.

they should've started with that ;)