Like a couple of innovative technologies, different people have different viewpoints on where WebAssembly fits the technology landscape. WebAssembly (also called Wasm) is certainly the subject of much hype right now. But what is it? Is it the JavaScript Killer? Is it a new programming language for the web? Is it (as we like to say) the next wave of cloud compute?

The idea of bytecode that can run anywhere dates back to the JVM inception (as far as I know). WebAssembly is the new implementation of an old idea. While WebAssembly is meant to run in the browser, Docker recently announced its capability to run WASM code without needing containers. In this post, I want to explore how it can work. Prerequisite Running WebAssembly is a beta feature and requires using containerd.

This is the 5th post in the Start Rust focus series. Up until now, JavaScript has been the only ubiquitous language available in browsers. It has made JavaScript much more popular than its design (and its associated flaws) would have allowed. I don’t want to start a holy war about the merits of JavaScript, but IMHO, it only survived this far because of its role in browsers.