Others have some good reasons to also consider. Also, launching new sandboxes in wasm is supposed to be extremely extremely extremely cheap.
Where-as launching a cgi-bin executable- even a very small libcgi based one-has a significant cost, requires a lot of kernel work & context switching.
With WCGI making new "processes" is nearly free & you don't have to context switch.
A lot of the excitement around wasm in general is that it could potentially enable a communicating-processes model of computing that would be inefficient today. Even current "function as a service" paradigms tend to retain processes, have warm/cold start distinctions. With wasm there is a potential to have requests spawn not just their sandbox, but to create whole graphs of lightweight sandbox/processes. Sometimes you might hear this described as a "Nano-functions" architecture.
Where-as launching a cgi-bin executable- even a very small libcgi based one-has a significant cost, requires a lot of kernel work & context switching.
With WCGI making new "processes" is nearly free & you don't have to context switch.
A lot of the excitement around wasm in general is that it could potentially enable a communicating-processes model of computing that would be inefficient today. Even current "function as a service" paradigms tend to retain processes, have warm/cold start distinctions. With wasm there is a potential to have requests spawn not just their sandbox, but to create whole graphs of lightweight sandbox/processes. Sometimes you might hear this described as a "Nano-functions" architecture.