[naikrovek]

ok, so I hate to be this guy and I'm going to do it anyway because it has to be said:

Did they just invent Java again? Aren't they promising what Java promised? Won't they hit the same problems that Java hits during its write-one-run-anywhere promises?

I'm asking honestly - why is WebAssembly outside of the browser needed?

[jzoch]

The idea of isolation that java espoused is not a bad one - it just wasnt executed well. Its not a java only idea either - see Native Client[0]. As with all things, execution and marketing matter. Java was lacking in both. [0] - https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.c...

[naikrovek]

OK, that's all correct and valid.

Java still exists and is a valid deployment platform.

Why is WebAssembly outside of the browser needed?

[chubot]

Java is no longer a valid deployment platform for dynamically executing untrusted code.

https://www.java.com/en/download/faq/chrome.xml

The Java Plugin for web browsers relies on the cross-platform plugin architecture NPAPI, which had been supported by all major web browsers for over a decade. Google's Chrome version 45 and above have dropped support for NPAPI, and therefore Java Plugin do not work on these browsers anymore.

All the other browsers killed it as well.

There's probably some way you can do it outside the browser, but I've never seen it used. Was it called Java WebStart or something?

I think it's because the sandbox had too many holes, and it was large and clunky. It didn't integrate well with the browser.

Java is obviously still extremely popular, but it's used in trusted contexts, like on the server, or "semi-trusted" contexts, like the Android app store. Although that is a different JVM which is probably easier to secure. And in that case there has to be a manual review process before allowing arbitrary code to execute (which is imperfect, but better than nothing.)

[AnIdiotOnTheNet]

It remains to be seen if WASI will actually have fewer holes in its sandbox. Fundamentally it is not different.

[chubot]

I think an important difference is that in the new architecture, there's a separation between WASM and WASI.

That is, computation and I/O are treated separately. It's more like capability-based security. WASM modules have no capabilities except the ones explicitly injected when you instantiate it.

As far as I understand, the JVM wasn't as rigorous about this, although to be fair I don't know all the details.

So WASI could still have a lot of holes, but WASM would survive and be useful. And then maybe someone else could come around and do it in a different, better way. That hasn't happened with Java.

[naikrovek]

Java inside the browser doesn't exist. That's fine. That's not what I'm talking about or making comparisons to.

Java runs just fine outside of the browser. You don't even need a browser installed to run Java applications.

Javascript and WASM run fine inside the browser, and that's not what I'm talking about or making comparisons to.

I'm talking about running WASM binaries outside of the browser. Similar to how Java runs outside of the browser. Very similar, actually. Java needs a runtime to be installed or available, so will WASI. Java is a write-once-run-anywhere type of platform, so is WASI.

Why does WASI need to exist if Java already exists for the intended uses?

[chubot]

> Why does WASI need to exist if Java already exists for the intended uses?

IMO, the reason is that the market showed that Java never got used like that. I can only speculate on the reasons, but as far as I can tell it comes down to:

1) The sandbox isn't good enough. See my sibling comment -- the separation between WASM and WASI makes a lot of sense, and I don't think Java had that.

2) The fact that you can't port C code to the JVM easily. In fact WASI addresses exactly that -- the API is more like POSIX than a brand "new" bunch of JVM APIs, which makes it easier to port existing native apps (C, C++, Objective C, Rust, etc.)

In other words, there's still a lot more "value" in native code apps than JVM apps. And it's too hard to port native code applications to the JVM.

For example, Photoshop, Illustrator, Word, Excel, etc. were never ported to the JVM. There are actually better analogs in the browser than on the JVM.

I ran windows for 15 years and Linux for 10-15 years. On neither of those platforms have I ever needed a JVM. I used to play online chess in a Java applet, and that's about it. Most common desktop apps avoid dependencies on the JVM. Probably the only reason I could think of installing one is to use Eclipse or IntelliJ.

The browser is the main reason why anybody had a JVM installed in the first place. Without that hook, the JVM becomes much less important on the client. It's still very important on the server.

Java is important and successful, but it empirically did not succeed at some of its design goals. Of course, WASM and WASI may also fail -- that remains to be seen. But to me they look like a good attempt, based on significantly different technical foundations.

[fulafel]

What is blocking C -> JVM compilation?

There seems to be such a compiler here: https://github.com/bedatadriven/renjin/blob/master/tools/gcc...

[Rusky]

The JVM doesn't run languages that weren't designed for it, like C or C++ or Rust. WebAssembly does.

This is important for a lot of reasons- huge amounts of existing code you can now use without JNI or whatever, a higher ceiling for optimization, more freedom to implement new kinds of languages.

The core WebAssembly standard is also much smaller than Java, as a consequence of this design. This makes it easier and/or more feasible to deploy in more scenarios, even without subsetting things the way mobile/embedded Java does.

[chrisseaton]

> The JVM doesn't run languages that weren't designed for it, like C or C++ or Rust.

You can run all those languages on top of the JVM!

The JVM also runs many other languages which weren't designed for it, like Ruby and Python.

[anoncake]

Python, Ruby and Common Lisp were designed for the JVM?

[imtringued]

Because Java exists for a different purpose, namely to run Java. (Ever tried to run your C or rust code on the JVM?)

[RivieraKid]

Well, the second paragraph in the article gives you the answer:

> Why: Developers are starting to push WebAssembly beyond the browser, because it provides a fast, scalable, secure way to run the same code across all machines.

It allows you to use the same code both inside and outside of the browser. For example, Figma might use it, they already have a web app and a regular app, both using WebAssembly, so WASI would perhaps simplify their code or allow them to add more native integration to their app.

Making a product that's a slight variation of an existing product is often enough to gain significant market share. For example, was Chrome needed when there was Firefox? Was Figma or Adobe XD needed when there was Sketch? Is Rollup or Parcel needed when there is Webpack and Gulp? This could go forever. I mean, should Java be the only universal deployment platform?

[JeremyBanks]

Using Oracle's Java Programming Language is an immeasurable legal liability.

[naikrovek]

There are open source and non-Oracle Java virtual machines you can buy support from if Oracle isn't your cup of tea.

It's not really a legal liability either. Lawyers for companies who use Java go over those agreements with a fine tooth comb and approve them before they're signed. There are no surprises (if your attorneys aren't frauds.)

[JeremyBanks]

Google's was not using Oracle's virtual machine, and their attorneys were not frauds, but they've been tied up in litigation for most of a decade and are facing potentially ten billion dollars in penalties.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oracle_America,_Inc._v._Google....

Java is not a responsible or ethical choice for anybody to use for any purpose.

[pdpi]

Google's case is less one of "using" Java, and more one of reimplementing it. It's an entirely different legal beast.

[pjmlp]

They just screwed Sun, created Android J++ with applause from wannabe be Google employees, and turned down the opportunity to buy Sun and own Java.

They deserve what they get.

[pjmlp]

I am pretty sure IBM has a couple of patents regarding VM implementations.

[sitkack]

Signed types and a proper cross language target. There is very little technical difference between the two, esp now that GraalVM has shipped. WASM is now the portable executable standard.

https://www.graalvm.org/

[smolder]

I'm sure this was meant to say unsigned types - Java only uses signed types.

[sitkack]

Correct, my mistake. unsigned types.

[imtringued]

So you're saying the JVM wasn't good enough so they had to make a better one? Why does the HN crowd constantly compare WASM with the "obsolete" JVM, when even the creator admits that it is not adequate?

[sitkack]

JVM could have been WASM but they made some unfortunate design decisions. They started as a target only for Java, GC, signed types. WASM started from the bottom, floats and ints (signed and unsigned) with plans to add GC, threads etc later.

It isn’t that the JVM is bad, it is that it isn’t the universal compilation target that WASM is.

Remember folks getting excited about LLVMIR, Bitcode? WASM is this but with a clean sandbox and minimal tractable semantics.

The JVM is awesome, esp with Graalvm and Truffle. WASM is the next evolutionary step.

[ryanschneider]

> why is WebAssembly outside of the browser needed?

It's arguably a better standard runtime than Java, for certain use cases. You don't see modern compilers targeting the JVM as an output target, but you do see them targeting WASM, there's probably good reason(s) for that (both technical and political/legal).

Furthermore, my understanding of WASI is that it allows standardization of _multiple_ runtimes, each domain specific.

For example, Functions as a Service. Currently AWS Lambda requires building a blob specially for them targeting their APIs and ABI. But what if Fastly, Fly.io, and the other "App CDN" FaaS providers come up with their own standard for "syscalls" for a WebASM-FaaS-1.0 spec? As a really bad example, the syscalls could be:

  - 1 GET URL
  - 2 POST URL
  - 3 Cache Read
  - 4 Cache Write

Meanwhile, in a totally different ecosystem, Ethereum can publish their own WASI for eWASM, where the syscalls are:

  - 1 Storage Read
  - 2 Storage Write
  - 3 Contract Call

Again, these are bad/contrived examples, the real syscalls would be better thought out than an HN comment, but the point is that you have two totally different runtimes, running is totally different places (on a CDN server, vs. inside an Ethereum node), both using the same tech stack w/ different "system interfaces" abstracting away what things your WASM code should have access to at runtime. Any language that has a compiler that targets WASM can be used in either case.

Furthermore, the barrier for entry as a syscall provider becomes much simpler too! If I want to make a local sandbox for FaaS testing, I just need to implement the syscalls from WebASM-FaaS-1.0 using local stubs, now I can test my FaaS locally. Way easier than the months/years probably spend reverse engineering the lambda environment for local testing. And if I come up with a novel solution for servicing one of those syscalls, hey, maybe I'll take my own stab at being a FaaS CDN. :)

Likewise for Ethereum and eWASM. Maybe I want to make a local test environment sandbox. Instead of re-implementing the EVM I "just" need to implement those syscalls outlined in the eWASM WASI spec (if such a spec existed). So now maybe light clients ship those syscalls over the wire somehow, and don't need to keep gigabytes of block chain data locally anymore.

edits: minor formatting

[naikrovek]

OK you answered a few of my questions and I still don't see why WASM is a requirement for any of this to happen.

No matter what language I use, no matter what platform I deploy to, if I want to interact with a service or with infrastructure, I'm going to have to use the provided API(s), WASM included.

If I deploy a pre-compiled binary to an AWS Lambda and an Azure Function, and it works on both, it's because I had to have that in mind when I wrote that software. Will that not be true for a runnable WASM binary? It sure seems like it would be true that I would need to detect which platform I'm running on and then execute the proper stuff for the detected platform.

If all APIs are going to be compatible with each other, so that, say, storing a file uses the same API call no matter what system or platform you're on (never going to happen; bear with me) implementing that in WASM outside of the browser does not suddenly make it possible.

This is an opinion, and on HN this is likely to be a very unpopular opinion. I don't expect anyone to adopt this opinion, nor do I expect to sway anyone's thought with this opinion. This really (really, really, really) feels like JavaScript/web people wanting to do things outside of the browser, with performance better than JavaScript alone can provide, and then, rather than simply using an existing language and runtime, deciding that the best route forward is to pave their own road to this destination with web technologies. This does not feel like the best route to take if you want to write software that performs well outside of a browser.

There are lots of other languages, runtimes, and platforms, that allow this today. And the web is a bag of chaos: I can't even get a consistent design or UI language across major websites, today. Buttons sometimes look like links, links sometimes look like menus, and buttons sometimes look like any of those, but somehow WASM outside of the browser is something everyone (except me) can agree on?

I'm skeptical that this is a good idea for anything serious.

Just like there are implementation problems with Java, there are going to be implementation problems with these runtimes that every platform is going to need in order to run this code, now. There are going to be many security concerns because (warning: incoming opinion) nearly all developers are terrible at thinking about preventing security vulnerabilities. Those same developers are usually OK when it comes to fixing them, and terrible at thinking about vulnerability prevention.

[ryanschneider]

> OK you answered a few of my questions and I still don't see why WASM is a requirement for any of this to happen.

It's _not_ a requirement, but at least to me it seems like a pretty good _possible_ solution.

I sense you're pretty jaded about web development, and I get that, but I don't agree this is "web people" trying to do things outside the browser, but rather I see it more as "systems people" trying to bring _some_ order to the chaos.

> nearly all developers are terrible at thinking about preventing security vulnerabilities

I totally agree. Which is why you should have a solid abstraction between the sandboxed code and what it's allowed to do, which WASM seems particularly good at (by only exposing services as syscalls). In theory, sandbox escapes in WASM should be the same level of difficulty as modern kernel exploits, so still _possible_ but _pretty hard_. And if multiple runtimes are using WASM for different things, if one is exploited it can be a learning lesson for all the other WASM runtimes, vs. the bespoke scenario where each custom VM has to go through the security bug discovery process by itself.

If _think_ what you're against is some sort of future where a "WASM-based-Electron" becomes the de facto standard for modern apps, and _that_ I largely agree with. In fact, re-reading the WASI standard I do feel like they are already "baking in" too much w/ WASI-core; I was expecting the core to just focus on a simple syscall ABI, not to include syscalls like filesystem reads and writes.

Some maybe what I'm really looking for is a "wasi-minium-abi" that just standardizes _how_ syscalls are made without actually standardizing any actual syscall numbers.

In summary, I feel like syscalls are a _very_ tried and true way to specify the API/ABI for a runtime, and that I hope we see more runtimes use WASM and a syscall ABI vs. rolling their own VM, but I agree that I'm in no rush to see WASM/WASI become the "Electron 2.0" of local app deployment.

[naikrovek]

I don't think that web technologies are going to be a good solution to anything that is not the web.

The web development community haven't even solved their own problem space very well; spreading to new problem spaces will likely not suit them as much as they believe it will.

[hutzlibu]

You should consider, that you just have a bias against "web people".

But this technologie comes not from javascript webprogrammers, but from browsermakers.

People who specialize in sandboxing, performance and portability since years. And they had to do this with javascript... and now they want a better foundation, BECAUSE of the flaws of javascript.

So I don't know if they will succeed making a better jvm either, but they certainly have the expertise that they might succeed.

[naikrovek]

I have no bias against "web people", I have a bias against using the wrong tool for the job.

This REEKS of developers who are psyched about WASM and want to create solutions where no problem exists.

If they want performant code outside of the browser, use any one of the 2-3 dozen languages that already do this! WHY is a new runtime, with the inevitable serious security issues that will be exposed throughout it's life, needed for this?

[RivieraKid]

Look at it this way, this won't cause any harm and there's some chance that it will develop into something useful and successful.

Right now there's no reason to conclude that this will turn into something that's no better than Java.

[naikrovek]

Has a single sandbox ever been written that has not had an escape vulnerability? I don't know of any. Sandboxes aren't safe, and everyone thinks of them as being a perfect prophylactic when they provably, demonstrably, and historically are not, in any way.

the solution is not to create another sandbox to run software in.

[morgancmartin]

Okay, I'll bite, what's the solution then? Personally, I don't have any novel software ideas lying around that are demonstrably better than what is proposed by WASI.

One advantage in this new push to build another sandbox is that Rust is leading the charge and is the de facto language of choice when building a greenfield WASM project. Given its propensity for memory safety and WASI's emphasis on capability-oriented security, I think the WASI team has a good chance of building something with a lot of value. Nothing here is novel (except perhaps Rust's extreme prioritization of memory safety) but that doesn't mean it can't or won't be an improvement over prior attempts.

I wonder how many of the previous sandbox vulnerabilities were viable due to some quirky memory manipulation techniques? Quite a few I would imagine.

[twic]

> Did they just invent Java again?

No. Like Java, they just reinvented DEL again:

https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5

[gwbas1c]

Targeting the JVM (or the CLR) requires that your language work nicely in the Java (or C#) memory model.

This basically means your language needs to work nicely with stop the world garbage collection.

(And yes, I know that modern garbage collectors aren't really stop the world, but the tradeoffs are still there.)

[pjmlp]

CLR was designed for multi-language since the beginning.

Go dig one of those .NET 1.0 SDK release CDs from 2002, plenty of sample languages on it.

[gwbas1c]

I know that.

The problem is that the CLR comes with the the C# memory model and garbage collection.

If you don't want that, then what's the point of the CLR? You can't use most of the .Net API without objects and garbage collection.

That basically rules out any kind of real-time application. The more modern garbage collectors allow soft real time applications, but you still can't do things like use the CLR to run an airplane.

If you want to use the CLR for a real-time application, you basically have to replace most of the .Net API with a completely pointer-based version, and consider implementing your own real-time memory management model.

At that point, you might as well target your language to compile natively and use standard libraries in the operating system.

[pjmlp]

The CLR was designed to support C and C++ as well, apparently new generations don't have a proper clue what CLR is all about.

Also contrary to WASM, there are real hardware devices actually shipping stripped down versions of it.

And if real time is a concern, then not using a real time OS is already the big first mistake, there is nothing here for WASM to prove, only to catch up with existing battle tested solutions.