The spectrum of isolation: From bare metal to WebAssembly

(buildsoftwaresystems.com)

17 points | by ThierryBuilds 1 hour ago

3 comments

  • ThierryBuilds 1 hour ago
    I wrote this because I kept seeing developers (myself included) confuse language-level isolation like Python venv with OS-level isolation like Docker. I wanted to trace the actual technical boundaries between them.

    The article maps out the differences between common execution environments—from physical bare metal and VMs to containers, process sandboxes, and virtual environments—to create a mental model of where the "isolation boundary" actually sits for each tool.

    • lateral_cloud 2 minutes ago
      Did you really write it though? Within the first paragraph it's fairly obvious this is heavily LLM-generated.
    • ianand 1 hour ago
      Since you mention serverless it might be worth mentioning firecracker and v8 isolates.
      • ThierryBuilds 59 minutes ago
        Thank you for the feedback. I will definitely add them as example solutions for serverless.
  • bflesch 45 minutes ago
    > This website collects anonymous usage analytics data via GoatCounter and Umami.

    My uBlock origin shows that googlefonts.com and fonts.googleapis.com are being blocked.

    It irks me a bit that your message explicitly mentions two trackers but it fails to mention the Google tracking. Google is also not mentioned in your privacy policy. Is there a reason for this?

  • shevy-java 46 minutes ago
    WebAssembly somehow does not seem to be able to break-through, unlike HTML, CSS, JavaScript did.
    • mickael-kerjean 25 minutes ago
      Or the people who write wasm don't talk too much about it. My OSS work (https://github.com/mickael-kerjean/filestash) has tons of it:

      1. to create web versions of applications that are traditionally desktop only to render things like Parquet, PSD, TIFF, SQLite, EPS, ZIP, TGZ, and many more, where C libraries are often the reference implementations. There are almost a hundred supported file formats, most of which are supported through WASM

      2. to create plugins that extend the backend and add your own endpoint or middleware as a way to enforce the code run in a constrained environment without the ability to send people's file out

      3. in the workflow engine to enable people to run their own sandboxed scripts without giving those a blank check to go crazy