I do agree that we tend to run a lot in a web-browser or browser environment though. It seems like a pattern that started as a hack but grew into its own thing through convenience.
It would be interesting to sit down with a small group and figure out exactly what is good/bad about it and design a new thing around the desired pattern that doesn't involve a browser-in-the-loop.
Heh, reminds me of those boxes Sun used to make that only ran Java. (I don’t know how far down Java actually went; perhaps it was Solaris for the lower layers now that I think about it…)
With hypervisors and a Linux kernel doing the heavy lifting, the WASM on bare metal probably just looks a lot like a regular process. I would bet Sun did similar … minus the hypervisor.
I do miss the Solaris 10/OpenSolaris tech though. I don’t know anything that comes close to it today.
Technically, yes. I built+ported a majority of Debian packages onto Nexenta OS but that effort (and many parallel efforts) just vanished when Oracle purchased Sun. I don't miss SVR4 packages and I never grew fond of IPS. So many open-source folk warned of the dangers of CDDL and they were largely realized in fairly short time. Unsurprisingly, #opensolaris on irc also had a precipitous drop-off around the same time.
dtrace/zones/smf/zfs/iscsi/... and the integration between them all was top notch. One could create a zone, spin up a clone, do some computation, trash the filesystem and then just throw the clone away... in very short time. Also, that whole loop happened without interacting with zfs directly; I know that some of these things have been ported but the ports miss the integration.
eg: zfs on Linux is just a filesystem. zfs on Solaris was the base of a bunch of technology. smf tied much of it together.
eg: dtrace gave you access all the way down to individual read/write operations per disk in a raid-z and all the way up to the top of your application running inside of a zone. One tool with massive reach and very little overhead.
Not much compels me to go back to the ecosystem; I've been burned once already.
I think it was far less special that advertized, so it was probably a stripped Solaris that ran a JRE hoping noone would notice. Dog slow they were at least so from my viewpoint, there was nothing magic about those boxes at all.
I do agree that we tend to run a lot in a web-browser or browser environment though. It seems like a pattern that started as a hack but grew into its own thing through convenience.
It would be interesting to sit down with a small group and figure out exactly what is good/bad about it and design a new thing around the desired pattern that doesn't involve a browser-in-the-loop.