DevOps Articles

What Is WebAssembly — and Why Are You Hearing So Much About It?

WebAssembly (or WASM for short), is starting to show up in a wide range of tools and platforms.

Think of it as a small, fast, efficient and very secure, stack-based virtual machine that doesn’t care what CPU or OS it runs on, that’s designed to execute portable bytecode — compiled from code originally written in C, C++, Rust, Python or Ruby — at near-native speed.

The specifications themselves are mature and it is in use in a number of areas, from Microsoft’s Blazor toolkit, to some browser applications,” he added.

For WebAssembly to go mainstream, it will need to be as easy to compile a WebAssembly binary as any other binary and if the tooling is easy to integrate into the way developers already work, as well as being available in the environments developers want to target.

Fastly is already taking advantage of a very early version of that kind of portable tooling as it builds WebAssembly tool, Schneidereit told us).