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Comment by scubbo | Hacker News Reader

I attended a talk by these folks at KubeCon last year - really great stuff. Sadly I'm not in a position to do anything with WASM in my professional life (and I have other priorities in my personal projects), but this for me is the "next big thing", more than any AI fluff - it will go unnoticed because it's low-level and transparent, but I'd bet paycheques on it having a huge impact in the coming years. Seems like a really exciting thing to be a part of.

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How would I capitalize on this?

Is there any specific language or framework I could learn to stay competitive?

Theoretically, any language that can target WASM, like Rust, Zig, or even C. I think the plan is to eventually support higher level languages with garbage collectors, but I don't know how much progress has been made on that front.

I haven't played with it enough to know which one provide the best experience at the moment, so I'd be interested to hear suggestions from others who have used it more extensively, especially with newer parts of the ecosystem like the component model, interface types, WASI, and generating ergonomic bindings to other languages (e.g. JS <> WASM)

wasm GC is available in Chrome. Not sure about native implementations.

Basically higher level languages with garbage collectors have to be converted twice, from their own bytecode into WASM, runing on a runtime that will never be as fined tuned as their own language specific runtime.

Example, the WASM GC design doesn't support all use cases of .NET GC with interior pointers.

There is really no reason to use this instead of packaging higher level languages with garbage collectors into a regular Kubernetes container.

I believe so too wasm is going to change the game in really profound ways

Why? It's just an (allegedly) faster and lighter weight applications runtime on Kubernetes. For many applications, this will be less convenient than proprietary serverless stuff.

Ae you saying this is bigger than AIs that are so smart that they can do software development?

I can't comment on Spinkube specifically, but I'd bet on serverside WASM-based orchestration, and WASM in general, being a big part of the next generation of IT stacks. If somebody can get the UX right, the "write once, run anywhere" promise of Java may finally come true.

It won't be like Java but better, because the moment you depend on external resources beyond pure compute, it won't be WORA any longer.

The thing that interest me about wasm is having ultra lightweight small processes, which happen to tap into very large pools of already resident libraries in a safe sandboxed fashion.

There's been huge huge strides in low-profile elegant serverless platforms built around v8 isolates. We can get all those wins and more - in an way more scaled out more multi-tenant way - with wasm. If it lives up to it's aspirations, which it seems on target to do.

Luke Wagner's WasmCon talk iterated through the core attributes of what makes wasm wasm and what those attributes unlock. The ability to host much much much more with a muchower profile, with extremely short-lived sandboxed runtimes, is incredibly enticing. The app-server model could finally be disrupted.

I have no patience for "bigger than AI" apples to oranges comparisons. Wasm is orthogonal, has it's own features & distinctions. The direct run off comparison shirks both of their value.

> I have no patience for "bigger than AI" apples to oranges comparisons. Wasm is orthogonal, has it's own features & distinctions. The direct run off comparison shirks both of their value.

Eh, fair. At the time I thought it was actually a fairly reasonably and pithy way to compare an hype-inflated technology that is being mindlessly applied to every possible target (while also, I concede, being thoughtfully, practically, and usefully applied in some cases, too), to an under-hyped and (AFAICT) almost unheard-of technology which seems on-track to provide an unshowy-but-significant optimization to basically any web technology ever, everywhere - but you're right that they are, indeed, trying to do different things, and comparing their impact is somewhat reductive. WASM is certainly not better than AI at the things that AI is trying to do.

In this context WASM is more like a slower container than an application runtime. The potential advantages being:

  * Far better isolation than a normal Linux container
  * If WASM takes off, maybe architecture-independent artifact distribution
  * If WASM takes off, maybe improved ability to call from one language into another

As a Kubernetes container runtime WASM today is probably most comparable to gVisor, with the somewhat huge caveat that it prevents you from just running normal Linux software.

It is basically Java and .NET application servers with YAML and extra complexity.

Except with a different set of languages that people actually want to use, as well as runtimes preinstalled on every user-facing computer on earth.

Have you never had to deal with java and .net installs across various platforms? It's a mess.

Yes, that is my bread and butter since 2006.

There are tons of languages that target CLR and JVM bytecode to chose from, CLR was even designed with C and C++ into acocunt.

Except with a different set of languages that people actually want to use, as well as runtimes preinstalles on every user-facing computer on earth.

Have you never had to deal with java and .net installs across various platforms? It's a mess.

Yes, that is my bread and butter since 2006.

There are tons of languages that target CLR and JVM bytecode to chose from, CLR was even designed with C and C++ into acocunt.

Hey I was there too :)

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