WebAssembly has steadily stepped out of its original niche as a technology specifically designed for the development of web applications. Today, its influence is seen across a broad spectrum of the technology space, penetrating industries and applications way beyond its initial design intent.
Over the past few days, technologists have converged in Bellevue, Washington for the annual WasmCon, exploring this versatile technology and gleaning insights from industry heavyweights.
State of WebAssembly 2023 Report
One of the highlights of this event was the release of the State of WebAssembly 2023 report. According to the report, a significant 58% of users employ WebAssembly for web applications development; 35% use it for data visualization, 32% utilize it for IoT, and 30% apply it within AI.
The other uses for WebAssembly include games, backend services, edge computing, and platform emulation among others.
WebAssembly: A Tool For All Developers
This diversity in use-cases strongly suggests the versatility of WebAssembly, reinforcing its value to developers across a wide array of sectors, not just those in front-end web development.
About 23% of the surveyed users were drawn to WebAssembly for its promise of faster loading times while 22% were attracted by the prospect of exploring new use-cases and technologies. Other attractions include the ability to share code between projects (20%), improved performance over JavaScript (20%), and the efficient execution of computationally intensive tasks (19%).
Notably, WebAssembly’s portability stood out to many users as a significant benefit; 64% of respondents indicated that they’re porting existing applications to new platforms. In addition, 62% are migrating existing applications to new languages. Interestingly, 76% of the respondents voiced their developments of new applications in WebAssembly.
WebAssembly System Interface (WASI)
A significant 34% of survey participants reported use of the WebAssembly System Interface (WASI) with another 34% planning to adopt the same within the next year.
Earlier this summer, the latest stable iteration of the WASI standard – WASI-Preview-2 – was unveiled. WASI-Preview-2 made strides in improvements in three critical areas: the core WebAssembly specification, WebAssembly Components and WebAssembly Interface Types, and WASI itself.
Improvements and Updates to the Core Specification
Significant enhancements to the core specification included the development of the Code Wasm Threads Prototype and garbage collection. The WebAssembly Components and WebAssembly Interface Types also received key updates including the integration of component naming and versioning and the addition of resource and handle types.
Liam Randall, CEO of Cosmonic and the co-chair of WasmCon, emphasized the importance of the WebAssembly Component Model stating that, “The WebAssembly Component Model is more than just a standard. It’s a movement of people that are standardizing on supporting the WebAssembly component model, because of its properties, like radical portability.”
Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) and the Initial Wasm Landscape
On another high note, the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) published the initial Wasm landscape featuring 120 projects spread across 11 categorizations. These 11 categories are grouped into two major areas: application development and application deployment.
As the use of Wasm spreads across more cloud-native projects, products, and services, the CNCF has worked together with the Wasm community to create a Wasm landscape to help better understand the full scope of the Wasm ecosystem.
WebAssembly is certainly proving its worth with its broad applicability and rapid enhancements. As more technologies and industries adopt WebAssembly, the technology’s reach and influence are expected to grow even more, heralding exciting developments for the future.
Tags: #WebAssembly #WasmCon #StateOfWebAssembly2023 #WebAssemblySystemInterface
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