In this episode, we speak with Matt Butcher, CEO at Fermyon. We discuss the four use cases for WebAssembly, why Wasm’s sandboxed approach is so secure, whether there's any danger retrofitting other use cases onto a language that was originally designed for the web, and how limitations like the lack of full networking support are going to be resolved.
Hosted by David Mytton (Console) and Jean Yang (Akita Software).
Things mentioned:
ABOUT MATT BUTCHER
Matt Butcher is the CEO of Fermyon. He is also a software engineer, tech author, speaker, and ex-professor. Formerly a principal software development engineer for Microsoft, he led a team of engineers that built open-source tools for cloud-native computing. They were responsible for Helm, Draft, OAM, Brigade, Krustlet, CNAB, Porter, Duffle, the VS Code Kubernetes Extension, and many others. Together with a team of 10 people from Deis Labs at Microsoft, he started Fermyon, a lighter, faster, and truly serverless cloud, architected to compile and ship code as Wasm binaries.
Highlights:
[Matt Butcher]: When Luke wrote his first blog post and said, “This is for a web browser,” it was built to not be particularly web-browser specific. It really just defined a machine code format in a way to execute that format. That was what kind of drew us to it as a technology. In the core WebAssembly 1.0 specification, there's nothing in there that binds you to a web browser environment, it’s just a straight-up runtime definition. So it was fairly easy to sort of pluck out a WebAssembly runtime and drop it somewhere else. In fact, there are several different WebAssembly runtimes that are not based on the browser at all. — [0:13:36 - 0:14:13]
[Matt Butcher]: If I were thinking about writing a new database, a new high-performance, multithreaded database, WebAssembly would not be the format I would target for this, right? Because there, you want to be able to do a lot of low-level management. Every little microsecond that you can tease out of IO and process manipulation is valuable. So I don't think we'll see those kinds of highly, highly IO-intensive tasks really land in WebAssembly for years because it's going to take the ecosystem a long time to really tune up and be fine-grained enough to deal with those things without compromising on security. It is possible that maybe never will we really want to write the kind of high-performance databases or high-performance number-crunching computing kinds of systems in WebAssembly. — [0:27:57 - 0:28:44]
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Dev infrastructure, with Guillermo Rauch (Vercel) - S03E01
Season 3 - Devtools Interviews
Developer experience, with Jean Yang (Akita) - S02E11
Terminal tools, with Michelle Lim & Zach Lloyd (Warp) - S02E10
Designing dev products, with Ellen Chisa (Boldstart) - S02E09
Web standards & privacy, with Desigan (Dees) Chinniah (Tor / Ex-Mozilla) - S02E08
Dev communities, with Rosie Sherry (Orbit) - S02E07
Homomorphic encryption, with Rand Hindi (Zama) - S02E06
Devtools investing, with Ed Sim (Boldstart) - S02E05
Decentralization, with Brooklyn Zelenka (Fission) - S02E04
Observability, with Charity Majors (Honeycomb) - S02E03
Security, with Thomas Ptacek (Fly.io) - S02E02
Dev infrastructure, with John Graham-Cumming (Cloudflare) - S02E01
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Can you rely on autofix? (Tyk & DeepSource) - S01E09
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Code search, dev flow & testing: Sourcegraph & Hoppscotch - S01E07
Open source vs commercial: Appsmith & Retool - S01E06
Snyk Open Source (dependency security monitoring) & Security Scorecard (security health metrics) - S01E05
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