The Legend of WebAssembly, and the Missing Link

Audience:
Topic:

WebAssembly (Wasm) is a universal low level bytecode that runs on the web. WASI is a low-level, modular system interface for WebAssembly. The talk will cover some of the basics of building WebAssembly modules for the browser using a guide like https://wasmbyexample and AssemblyScript. Then we will transition into building some simple programs compiled to WASI with AssemblyScript. We will highlight the tweet by Solomon Hykes (the cofounder of Docker) about WASI being the missing link back in 2008 for Containers. Once we have our WASI compiled program, we will show how we can run this on a server using Wasmtime. We will highlight how WebAssembly has a capability based permissions model, is extremely portable, and is sandboxed. Which makes it perfect for containerization, and refer back to Solomon Hykes’ Tweet. We will then close out by running the Wasi compiled version of QuickJS. This will express how you can run untrusted Javascript on your server without having to use something like Docker to achieve the same sandboxing.

Room:
Ballroom C
Time:
Saturday, March 7, 2020 - 16:30 to 17:30