Exotic Runtime Targets: Ruby and Wasm on Kubernetes and GitOps Delivery Pipelines - Kingdon Barrett
Channel: The Linux Foundation
Date: 2023-05-25

Exotic Runtime Targets: Ruby and Wasm on Kubernetes and GitOps Delivery Pipelines - Kingdon Barrett, Weaveworks

In the delivery ecosystem, devs have a great many choices to make regarding environment. In the past, the top-bar choices were limited to mainly two or three axes: language runtime, operating system, architecture. Now we can further consider these other new operational overheads: Kubernetes, Sandboxing, Browser targets! For a long time choosing a browser as a runtime target meant that choice for language would be severely limited; one could only choose from among the languages or runtimes that browsers could accept (the list kept getting shorter until it was practically only JavaScript! Flash? Java? Forget it, all gone). Wasm is the new binary instruction format for a stack-based VM, and portable compilation target, to save us all from writing only JavaScript forever. Wasm binaries are sandboxed code modules that can interchangeably target either browsers or servers at runtime, and we can use our familiar languages that a growing number are trending towards adding support for Wasm in the language core, including Ruby and Python. But does this mean we can just bring our Ruby to the browser and forget about Kubernetes forever, or is there more to consider before we start the party?