The road of running Nginx with WebAssembly

medium.com

28 pointssyrusakbary7 comments

I'm missing the use case here or understanding webassembly wrong. What is the use of running a webserver inside your webbrowser?

The goal of Wasmer is being able to run WebAssembly not just in the browser, but also in servers at native speed.

Why though?

There are a few reasons:

* It opens the possibility of having universal binaries regardless of the host operating system. That means running Nginx, Python, ffmpeg with just one binary (rather than one for each architecture)

* It could mean an easier interaction between languages (similar to GraalVM is doing Truffle) - without any recompilation

So, very simply put, it's like Java?

Yes, but with potentially much better (wider) industry adoption and support.

I still don't see the point of it for a piece of infrastructure like a web server. What's the trade-off? What do you gain for the overhead?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com