Why learn WebAssembly?

/ Jimmy Song

What are your study plans for 2023? I plan to learn a new technology – WebAssembly!

Why learn WebAssembly?

In 2019, Docker founder Solomon Hykes caused an uproar in the industry when he posted a tweet (see tweet below) saying that if WebAssembly and WASI existed in 2008, he would not have needed to create Docker. For a while, discussions about WebAssembly replacing Docker came and went. Also since then, WebAssembly has officially entered my sight.

If WASM+WASI existed in 2008, we wouldn’t have needed to created Docker. That’s how important it is. Webassembly on the server is the future of computing. A standardized system interface was the missing link. Let’s hope WASI is up to the task! https://t.co/wnXQg4kwa4

— Solomon Hykes / @[email protected] (@solomonstre) March 27, 2019

By 2021, there will suddenly be a lot of hype articles about WebAssembly on the Internet, including Istio, which I have been following for a long time, and the 1.12 version released that year began to support WebAssembly (see Istio 1.12 introduces the Wasm plug-in configuration API to expand the Istio ecosystem
), by introducing WasmPlugin
APIs that make it easier for developers to extend service meshes and gateways.

Recently I saw an article introducing the new trends of WebAssembly in 2023
, the author of the article, Matt Butcher, has a lot of background. He is the co-founder and CEO of Fermyon, a WebAssembly Cloud company, and one of the original creators of Helm, Brigade, CNAB, OAM, Glide, and Krustlet. Through his introduction, I am sure that WebAssembly is a promising technology, and it is time to learn it.

Market Outlook for WebAssembly

What’s more, the application fields of WebAssembly are getting wider and wider, like WasmEdge
Companies like this are using Tensorflow to push the boundaries of what can run with Wasm. Fermyon
is building WebAssembly tools for microservices, and Vercel
、 Fastly
, Shopify
and Cloudflare
Run code at the edge using WebAssembly. Figma
(acquired by Adobe for $20 billion in 2022) are using WebAssembly to provide higher performance in the browser for their applications, and their new parent company Adobe
are using WebAssembly to bring their desktop applications to the web.

How to learn WebAssembly?

In order to learn WebAssembly, I developed the following learning objectives:

  1. Understand the basic concepts of WebAssembly, including what it is, why you should use it, and how to run it in the browser;

  2. Learn the language of WebAssembly, a low-level assembly-like language that compiles to binaries;

  3. Use tools to compile code into WebAssembly format;

  4. Call WebAssembly modules in JavaScript;

  5. Learn about other features of WebAssembly, such as memory management, multithreading, and the WebAssembly System Interface (WASI);

  6. Learn how WebAssembly enhances security;

  7. Learn best practices for WebAssembly, such as code optimization and debugging;

  8. Develop WebAssembly plugins in Istio;

  9. Learn open source projects developed using WebAssembly;

WebAssembly reference material

Below is a list of some helpful resources for learning WebAssembly, including websites and books:

Summarize

WebAssembly is not only a technology for browsers to effectively make up for JavaScript defects, but also has a wide range of applications in the backend due to its small size, high efficiency and portability. In 2023, let’s learn WebAssembly together! I will also create a Wasm study group in the cloud native community in due course, welcome everyone to join the cloud native community
Share and learn together.

refer to

This article is transferred from https://jimmysong.io/blog/why-you-should-learn-wasm/
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