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by joshum97 2116 days ago
Good point about conditional compilation. It’s a trade off I’ll leave for language implementors to make. I tend to think that easily preventing a malicious package from sending your file system contents to some server is usually worth 10-20% perf loss, and that might even be made up by Wasm SIMD and other proposals.
1 comments

Capability based security models should solve that without perf loss, it's just unfortunate they aren't widespread or useful enough yet.

And not to discount your threat model which is a bit hyperbolic, but in applications where you've already making the decision to use a difficult-to-sandbox compiled language, you're not going to have the same justification.

WASM makes a lot of sense for the web where we have mounds of untrusted code, much of which needs to be fast, and is trivial to inadvertently be executed by an unsuspecting user. That's not necessarily true for native applications. The real travesty is the divide between web and native has been so blurred that it's hard to see where it is anymore.