[talkingtab]

This. I don't have a clear enough mental model for either docker or wasm+wasi, but I immediately thought of docker. What is docker except a bunch of purpose build operating system instances? And why do we need Linux installations (as much as I am a fan of Linux) when we could just run on WASI? And Electron, where each instance runs on an individual instance of a browser?

[simcop2387]

This is the same reason that things like unikernels have been built for. They haven't taken off because of how difficult it is to rebuild your application to also contain it's kernel, but this kind of sandboxing with WASM and WASI doesn't require that and could likely make things a lot simpler to deal with.

[pjmlp]

Yep, just like JEE servers deployed bare metal, oh wait.

[talkingtab]

I'm not sure I get the reference? Could you explain a bit? I know what Java EE servers are, but don't recall anything about bare metal deployments. Comparing my experiences with using JEE and Docker was that they are nothing alike. Just unclear as to your point.

[simcop2387]

Java was at one point going to have a bunch of CPUs[1] built around the JVM bytecode, that would have allowed J2EE and such to run on the bare metal hardware, but they largely didn't go anywhere.

The most successful attempts that i'm aware of are Jazelle[2] and Java-card[3] plans to augment the software solutions

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Java_processor

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jazelle

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Java_Card