eBPF and WebAssembly: whose VM reigns supreme?
The two hottest lightweight code execution sandboxes / VMs in the cloud-native world today are eBPF and WebAssembly. They both run high-performance bytecode programs compiled from C, C++, and Rust.
The biggest difference, however, is that eBPF runs inside the Linux kernel while WebAssembly runs in the user space. eBPF has some programming restrictions that makes it safe for kernel use cases (eg no infinite loops). But that also means that eBPF is Turing incomplete.…