The State of WebAssembly 2022

SCOTTLOGIC.COM

This is it, the moment we’ve all been waiting for … the results of the State of WebAssembly Survey 2022 🎉

survey

Avid readers of this newsletter will have noticed a shift in focus, we’re seeing a lot more articles and blog posts about WebAssembly within the context of Serverless and Containerisation )as a would-be competitor to Docker). I did expect to see this reflected in the survey results, however, the extent of this shift took me by surprise. These results are really worth looking WebAssembly is changing shape - and fast!

Here are some quick headlines …

  • Rust usage and desireabillity has continued to climb
  • Python has seen a big climb in usage
  • JavaScript has become a viable WebAssembly language
  • It’s been a good year for Blazor, with a big climb in usage and desire
  • Wasmtime is the most widely used runtime
  • The use of WebAssembly for Serverless, Containerisation and as a plug-in host has climbed significantly
  • Survey respondents are using WebAssembly much more frequently
  • Non-browser APIs are what WebAssembly needs the most

WebAssembly Components and wasmCloud Actors: A Glimpse of the Future

WASMCLOUD.COM

With those survey results in mind, this blog post is a great way to peer into the future. There have been a few different proposals that have sought to improve the integration experience of WebAssembly, with Component Model being the latest. It’s currently at phase 1, which is early in the proposal lifecycle, but is already gaining traction.

The goal of the Component Model is that you are able to glue together arbitrary Wasm modules that import or export functions, as specified by an interface file. Or in other words, it should allow zero-friction integration of modules written in any language.

This blog post bring the proposal to life with some practical examples.

You might also be interested in a talk by Saúl Cabrera from Shopify, which covers the Component Model and asks the question Are We Polyglot Yet?

Notes on WebAssembly

NEUGIERIG.ORG

This blog post enjoyed a good stint on the front page of Hacker News, and for good reason. It is a high quality, yet also really quite brief, introduction to WebAssembly. I’m guessing most of my readers will know this stuff, but why not share it with a friend? 😀

Video: Future Possibilities for .NET Core and WASI

YOUTUBE.COM

You’ve no doubt heard of Blazor, but what you might not know is that the .NET team are exploring the possibilities of server-side wasm. There are some great demos in this talk from Steve Sanderson, including an ASP.NET Core server running entirely within the browser. To be clear, this is a cool demo, but Steve did warn that you shouldn’t do this!