Fucking WHY? You need wasm when you don't know your hardware target. Why would you not know your target in a space mission?
this post was submitted on 10 Jul 2026
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Programming
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An interpreter is significantly easier to sandbox than native execution, and it means they can make guarantees the host system won't crash no matter what the program running is.
I could see it being useful for allowing third parties to run experiments on their hardware in space without having to manually verify the code safety.
That's a pretty good rationale, actually.
I can think of a few potential advantages:
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Portability: It means you can change your hardware target and you only have to worry about re-certifying this, instead of an entire compiler.
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Testing: You can probably run your WASM code fully deterministically in a deterministic simulation much easier than native code. Also when developing you don't need the actual hardware.
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Isolation / compartmentalisation. If I were them I would be strongly considering using the WASM component model (in future).
It would be good if they put their actual motivation in the readme though.