[hardwaresofton]

> I'm really eager to see what happens in the near future with WAT & WASI, but I'm also very aware of seeing a repeat of DLL hell.

I think we can at least say WebAssembly + WASI is distinct from DLL hell because at the very least your DLLs will run everywhere, and be intrinsically tied to a version and strict interface.

These are things we've just never had before, which is what makes it "different this time". Having cross-language runnable/introspectable binaries/object files with implicit descriptions of their interfaces that are this approachable is new. You can't ensure semantics are the same but it's a better place than we've been before.

> But, the reason I'm still on the fence is that I think there's more value in the UNIX style 'discrete commands' model, whether it's WASM or RISC-V I don't think anybody cares, but it's much more about self-describing interfaces with discoverability that can be glued together using whatever tools you have at your disposal.

A bit hard to understand here the difference you were intending between discrete commands and a self-describing interface, could you explain?

I'd also argue that WASM + Component Model/WASI as a (virtual) instruction set versus RISC-V are very different!

[pjmlp]

DLLs already run everywhere since CLR became cross platform.

Really this is walking an already trailed path, multiple times, we can even notice the parts grass no longer grows, how much it has been walked through.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/UNCOL

[afiori]

The "universal compile target" facet of wasm is much less focal than the "universally embeddable" one.

The sandboxing is the keystone holding up the entire wasm ecosystem, without it no one would be interested in it same as nobody would run javacript in browsers without a sandbox (we used to, it was called flash, we no longer do).

I am curious why you focus so much on "universal runtime/compile-target do fail" rather than its actual strenght when at least in the case of java applet they failed because their sandbox sucked (and startup times).

[pjmlp]

Because WASM sandbox only works, to the extent hackers have not bothered attacking existing implementations to the same level as they did to Java applets, which is anyway one implementation among many since 1958 UNCOL idea.

Additionally, it is a kind of worthless sandbox, given that the way it is designed it doesn't protect against memory corruption, so it is still possible to devise attacks, that will trigger execution flows leading to internal memory corruption, possibly changing the behaviour of an WASM module.

> Nevertheless, other classes of bugs are not obviated by the semantics of WebAssembly. Although attackers cannot perform direct code injection attacks, it is possible to hijack the control flow of a module using code reuse attacks against indirect calls. However, conventional return-oriented programming (ROP) attacks using short sequences of instructions (“gadgets”) are not possible in WebAssembly, because control-flow integrity ensures that call targets are valid functions declared at load time. Likewise, race conditions, such as time of check to time of use (TOCTOU) vulnerabilities, are possible in WebAssembly, since no execution or scheduling guarantees are provided beyond in-order execution and post-MVP atomic memory primitives :unicorn:. Similarly, side channel attacks can occur, such as timing attacks against modules. In the future, additional protections may be provided by runtimes or the toolchain, such as code diversification or memory randomization (similar to address space layout randomization (ASLR)), or bounded pointers (“fat” pointers).

--> https://webassembly.org/docs/security/

Finally, WASM is only as secure as its implementations, whatever the bytecode promises only matters if the runtimes aren't exploitable themselves.