Reply To: The Mill's Competition: Can it still win?

For those of you who care a lot about security (and are perhaps most interested in the Mill for security) but who still have the impression that WebAssembly is some in-browser-only toy and haven’t read about WASI and the efficient sandboxing capabilities — which sandbox libraries in your program *from each other*(!) thanks to the new nanoprocess model — I highly recommend reading https://hacks.mozilla.org/2019/03/standardizing-wasi-a-webassembly-system-interface/ and their big update just recently: https://bytecodealliance.org/articles/1-year-update .

Excerpt:

To help app developers build more stable apps [by making their backends scale better], Shopify wants to allow app code to run internally right within Shopify.

But how can you run this third-party code in a fast and safe way? By using WebAssembly.

With their new platform, built on top of Lucet [a WASM compiler, not interpreter], they’ve been able to run a flash sale with 120,000 WebAssembly modules spinning up and executing in a 60 second flash sale window, while maintaining a runtime performance of under 10 ms per module.

Yes, that’s WebAssembly running _on the server_, in production, at scale, and solving a very real security problem.