Re:Firefox's low-latency WebAssembly compiler
by afiori on Friday March 27, 2020 @05:39AM
(#22701446)
Again, the innovative part is the embeddability of the bytecode/VM. The CLR is not designed to run malicious code and still be safe (It had very interesting work on that with Midori, still).
The innovative thing with wasm is half political (that is it is socially free to implement and use) and half the lightweight reliable sandboxing.
It is perfectly possible that there is a subset of the CLR that would have been a better Web-Assembly than this WebAssembly, but the CLR chose different trade-offs so it isn't.
One of WebAssembly main distinguishing features is that it can compete with eBPF in term of safe embeddability.
The innovative thing with wasm is half political (that is it is socially free to implement and use) and half the lightweight reliable sandboxing.
It is perfectly possible that there is a subset of the CLR that would have been a better Web-Assembly than this WebAssembly, but the CLR chose different trade-offs so it isn't.
One of WebAssembly main distinguishing features is that it can compete with eBPF in term of safe embeddability.