With hypervisors and a Linux kernel doing the heavy lifting, the WASM on bare metal probably just looks a lot like a regular process. I would bet Sun did similar … minus the hypervisor.

I do miss the Solaris 10/OpenSolaris tech though. I don’t know anything that comes close to it today.

Solaris is still around, while OpenSolaris forks support Oxide endeavours.

Technically, yes. I built+ported a majority of Debian packages onto Nexenta OS but that effort (and many parallel efforts) just vanished when Oracle purchased Sun. I don't miss SVR4 packages and I never grew fond of IPS. So many open-source folk warned of the dangers of CDDL and they were largely realized in fairly short time. Unsurprisingly, #opensolaris on irc also had a precipitous drop-off around the same time.

dtrace/zones/smf/zfs/iscsi/... and the integration between them all was top notch. One could create a zone, spin up a clone, do some computation, trash the filesystem and then just throw the clone away... in very short time. Also, that whole loop happened without interacting with zfs directly; I know that some of these things have been ported but the ports miss the integration.

eg: zfs on Linux is just a filesystem. zfs on Solaris was the base of a bunch of technology. smf tied much of it together.

eg: dtrace gave you access all the way down to individual read/write operations per disk in a raid-z and all the way up to the top of your application running inside of a zone. One tool with massive reach and very little overhead.

Not much compels me to go back to the ecosystem; I've been burned once already.

I think it was far less special that advertized, so it was probably a stripped Solaris that ran a JRE hoping noone would notice. Dog slow they were at least so from my viewpoint, there was nothing magic about those boxes at all.

The Java went so far down that many early ARM cores could be placed in Jazelle DBX mode, which processed Java bytecode in hardware shudders

SIM cards and credit cards also run Java bytecode: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Java_Card