State of WebAssembly 2023 survey

GOOGLE.COM

I started this weekly newsletter, on a whim, six years ago when WebAssembly was very much in its infancy. At the time, I wasn’t sure whether I would stick with it, and whether WebAssembly would gain traction. Today, with 197 issues of WasmWeekly published to thousands of subscribers, I am certain this newsletter isn’t going away!

WebAssembly, and the community behind it, has grown considerably. It is increasingly being used for more diverse (and creative) applications leveraging an ever-growing range of programming languages.

In the 2022 WebAssembly survey we learnt that:

  • 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
  • I’m eager to learn what has changed in this past year. Please spare 5 mins to share your experiences, thoughts and opinions in the 2023 State of WebAssembly Survey .

I’ll share the results shortly after survey close. Thank you for subscribing and being part of this wonderful community.

Finally, a big thank you to Lawrence Hecht who helped review and tune the 2023 version of this survey.

VectorVisor

GITHUB.COM

The Graphics processing unit (GPU) is a specialised processor found in almost every computer (or mobile device), that provides the significant amount of compute capability needed for modern graphics (typically games). Quite simply, they are number-crunching machines. However unlike the CPU (Central processing unit) their functionality is more narrow and specialised, your typical Python or JavaScript program isn’t going to run on a GPU.

If you want to see just how much faster GPUs can be, take a look at this simple demo which renders a Mandelbrot fractal using JS, Wasm and WebGL

Vector Visor takes an existing single-threaded WebAssembly program and runs many copies of them using a GPU. Running WebAssembly on a GPU sounds amazing! I’m sure there are some limitations here (other than just being single-threaded), otherwise this is going to be the fastest WebAssembly runtime by a few orders of magnitude.

Carnegie Mellon University Launches WebAssembly Research Center

CS.CMU.EDU

This is an interesting one, Carnegie Mellon University are putting together a research centre dedicated to wasm:

CMU’s WebAssembly Research Center will be the first to unite researchers from across the university, other institutions and industry to explore how the platform is used now and how it could be used in the future.

Raverie Engine

GITHUB.COM

The Raverie Engine is a lightweight game engine that aims to recreate the Macromedia/Adobe Flash experience of old.

Ahhhh … Flash, a technology that brought graphics, sounds and quiet simply life to the early internet.