I gave a talk at Cloud Native wasm day talking about some of the stuff you can do with a WasmVM. Redpanda (where I work) is a storage engine who’s performance is predicated on kernel bypass (Direct IO, thread per core, locked memory). You can use stack switching to context switch between the VM and host application in a handful of cycles. Also having good upstream tooling for a lot of popular languages is big for adoption.
Cool. I watched it twice! I thought you meant the stack switching done by wasmtime, which is not "a handful of cycles," but I stand corrected: It's fiber/coro switching. Alfred, a friend of mine, gave a talk on using those on a bare metal unikernel we were creating back in the day! :)
Yeah it’s just the stack switching itself that is a handful of cycles, but there is not much more overhead for the full VM switch if you structure your embedding the right way. Code the code is source available if you want to peek at it!
Link to the talk if interested: https://youtu.be/t4-Al2FoU0k