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Comment by petilon | Hacker News Reader

What problem is this solving?

Depends on which "this" you're referring to. We (Docker) are trying to make it easier for developers to use the tools and capabilities they know and love to build, share, and run Wasm applications.

As far as Wasm itself, it's designed to provide a fast, lightweight, secure, and portable binary format. While it was originally designed to help bring native code to the browser, it's quickly spreading to the server side. Many folks are using it for edge/IoT, but it's growing into other areas (saw demos today of even using it in databases as psuedo stored procedures). Happy to dive in more if you have more questions!

I didn't get anything from that. My question was not about WASM but Docker+WASM project. Why problem does it solve?

the only thing I see is that after wrapping wasm inside a docker you can leverage all those docker tools(k8n,etc)? the docker solves portability and scalability issues with a reasonable overhead, so wasm hides inside docker can benefit from some?

Easy orchestration and deployment is the only thing I can think of. Because of docker's infrastructure.

But tbh if orchestration is really the concern, Docker + wasm seems less efficient than having a dedicated app that can orchestrate multiple wasm modules within the same process. But maybe that's something docker can solve later as the actual requirements emerge.

Sorry for the delayed response, but the problem we're trying to help solve is how to help lower the barrier of entry to using Wasm apps leveraging the tool many developers are already using. As an example example, with Docker+Wasm you can use a Dockerfile to build the app in a container image, distribute the Wasm bundle as an OCI artifact, and test it locally using the Wasm runtime. While the ability to build using containers has existed all along, the ability to actually run the Wasm app locally side-by-side your other containers (and leverage the same container network) is new. Hope that helps!

That does help thanks. It's still all a bit abstract to me because I (like many others) are still not familiar with WASM itself so this next step is probably going to go unappreciated for a while.

I'm a bit surprised by several comments in this post talking about how WASM could replace containers but I don't have the context around it

This should be the copy of the announcement. Finally it's clear what it does. The announcement doesn't explain at all what docker + WASM is.

Summary of summary: Dockerfile -> docker build -> docker container with the WASM app and runtime inside -> docker push/pull -> docker run container.

However, even if I never compiled anything to WASM I think that it was already possible to build an image with a WASM container and runtime inside (as for any other language/runtime.) So what's the friction this is removing from the process?

I'm honestly really confused about the specific role docker is playing here.

What, exactly, is Docker doing? Is it compiling the application? Is it making a runtime for the wasm binary? Is it being the runtime for the wasm binary, so the end user builds through whatever usual build processes and gets a binary they can then easily run?

If the wasm binary is lightweight and portable, why is docker useful?

edit: Given the other comments about "what problem does this solve" I think maybe the blog post has missed its mark slightly

Yeah. Not trying to be cynical, but this feels like someone at Docker said "we need to have a WASM story" and this is what they came up with. I really don't see the point.

I’m curious about this too.

I wonder if it could make testing frontend code that uses WASM (but not DOM) fast and easy since you wouldn’t need to fire up a complete browser environment.

I’m not sure that it’s possible at the moment. In the past when I needed to test a WASM integration, I ended up using that approach and it was kind of a pain not to get immediate feedback on the WASM code’s API tests since it was essentially only testable through the complete integration environment.

I like integration tests, but I like smaller and faster test suites for easing development in some conditions as well.

You can currently test a WASM-targeted API if you use unit tests or other language-level testing approaches, but you won’t get the constraints of the WASM runtime as far as I know. Maybe the lack of garbage collection could be a critical constraint to test against.

I suppose you could even test dynamically linked binaries without a browser as well.

I’m sure there’s far more to it that I’m not aware of, and maybe testing really isn’t that useful of a feature here — I’m just guessing based on my own experience.

I am thinking isomorphic (share libraries between frontend and backend) but in a language of your choice instead of JS.

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