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

WebAssembly sandboxing between modules on x86 still relies on each module’s memory occupying disjoint pages. The only reason the sandboxing is “cheap” is because 32-bit values can’t express numbers greater than or equal to 2**32, and implementations reserve that much address space for each module. But forcing them to run on disjoint pages results in scalability limits on how many sandboxes you can have and what the performance of communication between them will be. More pages means more TLB pressure.

I have not worked through the mental exercise, but my guess is that portal calls and the like on the Mill would let a WebAssembly JIT make sandboxing more performant than on x86 and generalize better to 64-bit. I’d need to refresh myself on how portals on the Mill interact with paging and permissions to say with confidence though and it would still be speculative until we have hardware.

I still find it a little odd to be thinking along the lines of “well if you ignore Mill’s core economic advantage will it still be better?” though.