For me, Cloudflare's decision to go with V8 Isolates was really smart and that blog post is a brilliant explanation of how one looks at trade-offs in engineering. Truly amazing work.

That said, no I don't believe V8 Isolates are the future of computing - and I think I'll explain why by comparing it to shared PHP hosting.

PHP became so big because it solved something that was very important for a lot of people at the time - how can I deploy and run my code without eating up a lot of RAM and CPU. If you deployed Python, your app would be running the whole Python stack just for you. You'd need resources for a python interpreter, all the HTTP libraries, all your imports, and then your code. On the other hand, if you ran PHP, you'd be sharing the PHP interpreter, the PHP standard library (which was written in C and not in PHP), and the server would only need to run your code. If your code was basically `mysql_select($query); foreach ($result in $results)...`, then the server was executing basically nothing. All the hard work was in C and all the request/response stuff was in C and all of that code was being shared with everyone else on the box so there was almost not RAM usage.

V8 Isolates are similar in a lot of ways. You get to share the V8 runtime and pay its cost once and then just run the code needed for the user. It makes sharing space really good.

So how isn't this the future? Not to knock PHP, but PHP isn't dominating the world. Again, this isn't about knocking PHP, but it's not like people are going around being like "you'd be stupid to use anything other than PHP because of those reasons." Likewise, V8 Isolates aren't going to dominate the world. Most of the time, you're working at a place you have services that will be getting consistent traffic and you can put lots of endpoints into a service and you just run that service. There are things like having well-JIT'd code that can be good with long-running processes, you can use local caches with long-running processes, you pay the startup costs once (even if they might be tiny in some cases). And I should note that there is work to get serverless stuff some of those advantages as well. I believe Amazon has done work with kinda freezing some serverless stuff so that a warm instance can handle a new request. But given the cost of a lot of serverless options, it seems expensive if you're getting consistent traffic.

Again, I think Cloudflare's move with Workers was brilliant. It offers 80% of what you need at a lot cost and without needing the same type of high-effort, high-resource setup that wouldn't make as much sense for them. I wish Cloudflare a ton of success with workers - it's a great thing to try. I don't think it's the future of computing. Really, it's just too narrow to be the future of computing - nothing like that is going to be the future of computing.

If you're worried that you're missing the future of computing if you don't hop on it, don't be. There's no single future of computing and while V8 Isolates are great for Cloudflare's purpose, I don't think it provides advantages for a lot of workloads. Again, I think that is such a brilliant article and I think Cloudflare made a smart decision. I just don't think it's the future of computing.