The thing I want to achieve with WebAssembly is still proving a lot harder than I had anticipated.
I want to be able to take strings of untrusted code provided by users and execute them in a safe sandbox.
I have all sorts of things I want this for - think custom templates for a web application, custom workflow automation scripts (Zapier-style), running transformations against JSON data.
When you're dealing with untrusted code you need a really robust sandbox. WebAssembly really should be that sandbox.
I'd like to support Python, JavaScript and maybe other languages too. I want to take a user-provided string of code in one of those languages and execute that in a sandbox with a strict limit on both memory usage and time taken (so I can't be crashed by a "while True" loop). If memory or time limit are exceeded, I want to get an exception which I can catch and return an error message to the user.
I've been exploring options for this for quite a while now. The furthest I've got was running Python in wasmtime: https://til.simonwillison.net/webassembly/python-in-a-wasm-s... and running Pyodide inside of Deno: https://til.simonwillison.net/deno/pyodide-sandbox
Surprisingly I've not found a good pattern for running a JavaScript interpreter in a WASM sandbox yet. https://github.com/justjake/quickjs-emscripten looks promising but I've not found the right recipe to call it from server-side Python or Deno yet.
Can Extism help with this? I'm confident I'm not the only person who's looking for a solution here!
I want to be able to take strings of untrusted code provided by users and execute them in a safe sandbox.
I have all sorts of things I want this for - think custom templates for a web application, custom workflow automation scripts (Zapier-style), running transformations against JSON data.
When you're dealing with untrusted code you need a really robust sandbox. WebAssembly really should be that sandbox.
I'd like to support Python, JavaScript and maybe other languages too. I want to take a user-provided string of code in one of those languages and execute that in a sandbox with a strict limit on both memory usage and time taken (so I can't be crashed by a "while True" loop). If memory or time limit are exceeded, I want to get an exception which I can catch and return an error message to the user.
I've been exploring options for this for quite a while now. The furthest I've got was running Python in wasmtime: https://til.simonwillison.net/webassembly/python-in-a-wasm-s... and running Pyodide inside of Deno: https://til.simonwillison.net/deno/pyodide-sandbox
Surprisingly I've not found a good pattern for running a JavaScript interpreter in a WASM sandbox yet. https://github.com/justjake/quickjs-emscripten looks promising but I've not found the right recipe to call it from server-side Python or Deno yet.
Can Extism help with this? I'm confident I'm not the only person who's looking for a solution here!