phickey

Despite naming them isolates, the V8 team does not consider them to be a security boundary.

from the article: "With our old infrastructure it went out over the internet, ran the edge function, and came back to us to pass on. With the new compute platform, the request is forwarded to a compute node within our network."

As far as I know, Cloudflare Workers have always executed within Cloudflare's network, not gone out to the internet and executed elsewhere (which I read as being in a hyperscaler cloud).

In your reading, what is the distinction between blindsight’s scrambler and real intelligence? My reading is that it’s just as real, and draws out the disadvantages a sense of self constrains intelligence with

Wasip1 did not specify sockets. Some implementations have made non-standard additions to add them, but sockets were not added to the standard until wasip2.

No, the stack switching proposal is not used. Stack switching is a set of core Wasm opcodes that permit a guest to change its own stack. Instead of using opcodes inside the Wasm, the stackful async mode of the component model’s ABI calls out into the component model implementation where it can manipulate the stacks with special host powers - JSPI is sufficient on web engines to express this, and wasmtime manages guest stacks in memory.

When stack switching becomes available in all engines, it will be possible to implement this part of the component model in pure Wasm without host magic, e.g. web engines will be able to avoid the call out to JS to use JSPI.

There is a wat (s expression) syntax for the component model. The problem with the wat syntax for both Wasm and the component model is they’re a reflection of a binary format, and therefore are terrible for writing by hand. They’re designed to be written by tools, and the text format is just to help you understand the binary format.

I’ve written Wasm and component model wat extensively over the last decade to develop tests for Wasmtime, and even for an expert it’s a bad experience.

Wit syntax is easy to read and write by hand. There are high quality parsers that can transform it to and from the binary or wat format as needed, and code generators for a wide range of languages. It’s a way, way better experience in every way to deal with wit compared to the wat format.

WebAssembly is a compiler target, not a human-authored language. There is exactly one audience of people for writing wat by hand: spec and tutorial authors and readers. Anyone actually developing an application they want to use will use a compiler to produce WebAssembly. Prove me wrong and write Roller Coaster Tycoon in raw wasm if you want, but having written and maintained wasm specs and toolchains for nearly a decade, I will never write any wat outside of a spec or tutorial.

Real programs, whether native JavaScript or in any other language that targets Wasm, have concurrency. Would you rather the component model exclude all concurrent programs, and fail to interact with concurrent JavaScript? The component model is meeting the web and programmers where they're at. Unless you're one of the few people implementing the low level bindings between components and guest or host languages, you don't have to ever read the CM spec or care about the minutae of how it gets implemented.