Fucking WHY? You need wasm when you don’t know your hardware target. Why would you not know your target in a space mission?
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.
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