If this statement is true, there is no need for Docker, because JVM+JAR existed in 2008! Docker can do more than WASM or JVM+JAR: it can run non-WASM and non-JVM apps like PostgreSQL, etc...
To get an impression of the performance penalty, just run the following query:
SELECT SUM(i) FROM generate_series(0, 1000000, 1) tbl(i);
Now that is not WASM's fault - when running the same query in duckdb-wasm [1] on my laptop the query takes 10ms using WASM, and 5ms when run locally, with a slow-down of only a factor of 2. But in order to achieve those results we did have to adapt the DuckDB codebase to compile natively to WASM. That is absolutely possible but it does take engineering effort - particularly when it comes to larger older projects that are not designed from the ground up with this in mind.
Seems like some X can now run in wasm should come with disclaimer (includes Linux)
This is incorrect, there is a long list of limitations that your C/C++ code must conform to in order to compile to WASM. There's a whole section dedicated to this in the Emscripten docs: https://emscripten.org/docs/porting/index.html.
The chances your existing C/C++ app will compile to WASM and run correctly are much smaller than with Docker. However, the chances your WASM-compiled code will be able to run in a browser are much higher than with Docker (which is the real "killer use case" IMO).
> not like the jvm which is designed primarily for Java in the front end
This is also wrong, JVM bytecode is explicitly designed to be polylingual and is the compilation target for many non-Java languages like Scala, Kotlin, and Clojure. WASM being a compilation target is not what makes it unique from the JVM.
LLVM bitcode isn't all that portable though, and of course, the binary will still be OS specific because C/C++ code relies on native APIs. The primary reason to do this is so the Graal JIT compiler can optimize native code and higher level dynamic script/bytecode together and remove interop overhead.
However, you can theoretically run whole programs this way inside the Graal sandbox. If you do that you get an emulation of POSIX that is reimplemented on top of the Java standard library, so the code becomes portable, and in managed mode there's an additional party trick - the native C/C++ malloc is replaced with garbage collected allocations and memory accesses are bounds checked. So code run this way gets all the memory safety errors blocked automatically. This upgrade comes with two costs though, one is slower execution/more memory usage, and the other is you have to buy GraalVM EE. The community edition can run bitcode, but not in the sandboxed/managed mode.
Oh and GraalVM can also run WASM. So you can have cake and eat it, everything running together via their 'polyglot' interop system.
That has some limitations, but for the most part it works just like you would expect pthreads to.
https://emscripten.org/docs/porting/pthreads.html#special-co...
JVM can only run apps written for it: Docker & WASM don't have that limitation.
> it can run non-WASM and non-JVM apps like PostgreSQL, etc...
but WASM can run Postgres
- Article: https://supabase.com/blog/postgres-wasm
- Repository: https://github.com/snaplet/postgres-wasm
- HN Thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33067962
Of course it does; WASM is just a format, still need to create the right functions that the runtime will call to do the useful stiff
Of course they do. You can only run apps on WASM that have been compiled to WASM bytecode. You can only run apps on Docker that have been compiled to whatever bytecode is supported by the container runtime (which can be x86, ARM, x64, etc.).
> but WASM can run Postgres
WASM can run WASM-compiled Postgres. It has to be specifically compiled for WASM, which also means it generally needs to be ported to WASM first (as WASM runtimes have a lot of limitations that arbitrary C programs probably don't conform to).
Someone put in the effort to get Postgres to compile for WASM. That's great :) Maybe someday every application will compile to WASM as the preferred choice over the linux interface.
Compiling apps for different targets is VERY MUCH not a simple, low effort task though. Something like a database that must have an incredible number of optimizations in the way it makes syscalls, will have to a full stream of work to keep each target running well.
It can be done. But if "one of these thigns is not like the other" with your three things- Docker is the odd duck out.
In fact GCC used to have a JVM target, called GCJ. It was removed due to lack of maintenance.
The browser engine developers effectively paid a huge up front fixed cost and now anyone can use Webassembly in nodejs which then spills over to more and more use cases like cryptocurrencies using a modified WASM VM for their zk sync layer two solution.
The JVM simply wasn't built for these use cases.
A generic compilation target to the JVM would have worked, but it wasn't available 15 years ago, and GraalVM is mature about now, but so is WASM.
Which also involves rewriting literally everything to Java.
> In fact GCC used to have a JVM target, called GCJ
Which again, had a Java frontend. So, nothing like targeting WASM with C/C++/Rust.