Imagine for a moment that docker images were not tar files full of amd64 ELF binaries.

But instead were tar files full of WebAssembly binaries, compiled against a custom libc that used a strict syscall boundary just like a real kernel.

That is what Project Columbia is.

It does! A sample busybox image will be uploaded shortly that folks can try.

HAHAHAH. (cough)

No. Eventually maybe! It doesn't do 99% of what docker does yet. The aim right now is just to flesh out the syscall boundary layer.

LLVM/Clang's linker, lld, doesn't yet support dynamically linked webassembly. That's going to be a limiting factor pretty early for anything using dlopen. Hopefully that will get solved eventually.