This blog is not going to define what WebAssembly is, how it interacts with JS or other languages; there are too many blogs and posts available on the internet already.

If you’re not familiar with WebAssembly, I would suggest you start here:

This blog post is about wondering what WebAssembly can look like for some usecases.

Run Everywhere

WebAssembly can run everywhere - atleast that’s the goal. It’s performant - as performant as C/C++ and it’s secure.

WebAssembly is a type of code that can be run in modern web browsers and provides new features and major gains in performance.

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/WebAssembly/Concepts

Open Questions

Although designed for the web, WebAssembly is able to run portably across architectures. This can be a nice way to distribute applications. Some day perhaps WebAssembly runtimes will be a part of all OSes.

What needs to be determined IMO is:

  • Realtime capabilities

    Can WebAssembly modules written in C/C++ provide any RT capabilities? If so, then it’ll be interesting to evaluate whether a WebAssembly runtime is all that a PLC should be. Apps running the PLC would be delivered like software. Less stickiness for everybody.

  • Recompile all the things

    Can WebAssembly runtimes replace native programs? How about message queues, brokers implemented in WebAssembly? I know it’s not possible to compile all complicated software to WebAssembly today - but is that the future too?

  • UI

    Will Slack and it’s likes re-implement significant portions of their code to WebAssembly? Should work, right?

  • Edge

    Fastly has already done lots of work with their CDN running WebAssembly-isolated workloads. Can we bring this down to the Edge where we’re running containers today?

Conclusion

There’re so many things I’m looking an answer for. This year is going to be awesome!