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Comment by colesantiago | Hacker News Reader

What are the use cases of unikernels and WASM?

This is what the first section of the article is about.

It talks about learning and fun, but there's always a remote chance that someone could have an idea for a practical application.

Won't speak to WASM, or I'll go all "get off my lawn."

But to me the value-sell of unikernels is: 1) Perf; squeak out some extra cycles by throwing overboard things you don't need and pulling things into "ring 0" that you do 2) Simplify; Potentially reduce complexity by ditching some of the things you don't need and 3) Security; Potentially change attack surface ... again, by....

To be clear: I don't think this is right for writing microservices and webapps like most of the people on this forum are employed doing... I think the use case is more for people building infrastructure (databases, load balancers, etc. etc.)

as micro vms can for some (not all) tasks compete with Linux containers but have the benefit of not exposing you Linux kernel to less trusted code

hence why e.g. some cloude on the edge provider convert you docket image to a micro vm when running it

so maybe some use can be found there

through wasm in micro vm in the edge probably will have a hard time competing with wasm as a sandbox on the edge as such provider probably have an Easter time to add useful boundary features/integrations

Probably to expand where you WASM can go: in the browser, in a docker container, and now in a lightweight OS that could go on an embedded device.

One day it can even run on SIM cards and Visa/Mastercard chips!

I see what you did there...

Yep. :)

All the different ways to reinvent the JVM.

True but can’t Web Assembly also be non-GC’d?

Only because they are already five years late adding GC support, and even then WASM isn't the first bytecode format supporting C and C++, there are already a couple since 1980's.

But it's an opt-in GC? It's not accidental by any means

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