WebAssembly, with Matt Butcher (Fermyon) - S04E08

In this episode, we speak with Matt Butcher, CEO at Fermyon. We discuss the four use cases for WebAssembly, why Wasm’s sandboxed approach is so secure, whether there's any danger retrofitting other use cases onto a language that was originally designed for the web, and how limitations like the lack of full networking support are going to be resolved.

Hosted by David Mytton (Console) and Jean Yang (Akita Software).

Things mentioned:

ABOUT MATT BUTCHER

Matt Butcher is the CEO of Fermyon. He is also a software engineer, tech author, speaker, and ex-professor. Formerly a principal software development engineer for Microsoft, he led a team of engineers that built open-source tools for cloud-native computing. They were responsible for Helm, Draft, OAM, Brigade, Krustlet, CNAB, Porter, Duffle, the VS Code Kubernetes Extension, and many others. Together with a team of 10 people from Deis Labs at Microsoft, he started Fermyon, a lighter, faster, and truly serverless cloud, architected to compile and ship code as Wasm binaries.
 

Highlights:

[Matt Butcher]: When Luke wrote his first blog post and said, “This is for a web browser,” it was built to not be particularly web-browser specific. It really just defined a machine code format in a way to execute that format. That was what kind of drew us to it as a technology. In the core WebAssembly 1.0 specification, there's nothing in there that binds you to a web browser environment, it’s just a straight-up runtime definition. So it was fairly easy to sort of pluck out a WebAssembly runtime and drop it somewhere else. In fact, there are several different WebAssembly runtimes that are not based on the browser at all. — [0:13:36 - 0:14:13]

[Matt Butcher]: If I were thinking about writing a new database, a new high-performance, multithreaded database, WebAssembly would not be the format I would target for this, right? Because there, you want to be able to do a lot of low-level management. Every little microsecond that you can tease out of IO and process manipulation is valuable. So I don't think we'll see those kinds of highly, highly IO-intensive tasks really land in WebAssembly for years because it's going to take the ecosystem a long time to really tune up and be fine-grained enough to deal with those things without compromising on security. It is possible that maybe never will we really want to write the kind of high-performance databases or high-performance number-crunching computing kinds of systems in WebAssembly. — [0:27:57 - 0:28:44]

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