ZeroVM vs Flatpak: What are the differences?

What is ZeroVM? Open-source lightweight virtualization platform. ZeroVM is an open source virtualization technology that is based on the Chromium Native Client (NaCl) project. ZeroVM creates a secure and isolated execution environment which can run a single thread or application. ZeroVM is designed to be lightweight, portable, and can easily be embedded inside of existing storage systems.

What is Flatpak? Build and distribute applications on Linux. It is a next-generation technology for building and distributing desktop applications on Linux.

ZeroVM and Flatpak can be primarily classified as "Virtual Machine Platforms & Containers" tools.

Some of the features offered by ZeroVM are:

• Small, Light, Fast - ZeroVM is extremely small, lightweight, and fast. An execution environment can start in as little as 5 milliseconds.
• Secure - ZeroVM security is derived from the Chromium Native Client (NaCl) project and is based on the concept of software fault isolation.
• Hyper-Scalable - ZeroVM makes it easy to create large clusters of instances, aggregating the compute power of many individual physical servers into a single execution environment.

On the other hand, Flatpak provides the following key features:

• Build for every distro - Create one app and distribute it to the entire Linux desktop market.
• Stable platforms - Runtimes provide platforms of common libraries that you can depend on.
• Consistent environments - Develop and test your application in an environment that’s identical to the one users have.

ZeroVM is an open source tool with 744 GitHub stars and 74 GitHub forks. Here's a link to ZeroVM's open source repository on GitHub.