WebAssembly's Status in Computing

Liam Crilly, Senior Director of Product Management at NGINX, discussed the potential of WebAssembly (Wasm) during this recording at the Open Source Summit in Bilbao, Spain. With over three decades of experience, Crilly highlighted WebAssembly's promise of universal portability, allowing developers to build once and run anywhere across a network of devices.

While Wasm is more mature on the client side in browsers, its deployment on the server side is less developed, lacking sufficient runtimes and toolchains. Crilly noted that WebAssembly acts as a powerful compiler target, enabling the generation of well-optimized instruction set code. Despite the need for a virtual machine, WebAssembly's abstraction layer eliminates hardware-specific concerns, providing near-native compute performance through additional layers of optimization.

Learn more from The New Stack about WebAssembly and NGINX:

WebAssembly Overview, News and Trends

Why WebAssembly Will Disrupt the Operating System

True Portability Is the Killer Use Case for WebAssembly

4 Factors of a WebAssembly Native World