Advocates believe it’s ready for the mainstream, yet this enigmatic technology has yet to truly break through.
Hailed as the fourth official language of the web, WebAssembly (Wasm) is a World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) standard that offers a language-agnostic code compilation target with high performance and robust security.
Recent efforts around Wasm runtimes, and Wasm’s proposed companion interface (WASI), are helping it run outside the browser in any environment, providing significant portability benefits that are truly platform agnostic.
While this has provided the most progressive tech companies with plenty of opportunities to push things forward, Wasm has yet to see the sort of ubiquity and ecosystem maturity of more established deployment paradigms like virtual machines, the Java virtual machine (JVM), or Docker containers before it.
