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by lmeyerov 788 days ago
Last we checked for one of our use cases around sandboxing, key pydata libraries were slowly moving there, but it takes a village.

At that time, I think our blockers were Apache Arrow, Parquet readers, and startup time. There were active issues on all three. The GPU & multicore thing is a different story.as that is more about Google & Apple than WASM wrt browsers, and I'd be curious about the CUDA story serverside. We didn't research the equivalent of volume mounts and shmem for fast read-only data imports.

For Louie.AI, we ended up continuing with serverside & container-based sandboxing (containers w libseccomp, nsjail, disabled networking, ...).

Hard to motivate wasm in the server for general pydata sandboxing in 2024 given startup times, slowdowns, devices, etc: most of our users who want the extra protection would also rather just self-host, decreasing the threat model. Maybe look again in 2025? It's still a good direction, just not there yet.

As a browser option, or using with some more limited cloud FaaS use cases, still potentially interesting for us, and we will keep tracking.

1 comments

Pyarrow is giving a headache trying to get it compiled with Emscripten
An irony here is that we donated the pure JS/TS implementation of arrow to apache