Sagun Garg

3 x Founder/CTO (15+yrs), 2 x CTO Advisor, 3 x EIR, 9+ Polyglot Programmer, ex-Deloitte, B-Tech(CS).

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Written by Sagun Garg
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May21: Webassembly Basics & Python

What is WebAssembly?

Quoting the WebAssembly site:

WebAssembly (abbreviated Wasm) is a binary instruction format for a stack-based virtual machine. Wasm is designed as a portable target for compilation of high-level languages like C/C++/Rust, enabling deployment on the web for client and server applications.

About speed:

WebAssembly aims to execute at native speed by taking advantage of common hardware capabilities available on a wide range of platforms.

About safety:

WebAssembly describes a memory-safe, sandboxed execution environment […].

Update on WebAssembly

  • WebAssembly’s first major version focused on the browser.

  • WebAssembly is now expanding its focus beyond just the browser with a series of features designed to enable its vision of a portable binary format on many platforms, bringing great benefits in tooling and language-agnosticity.

  • A large number of non-browser runtimes have appeared with different areas of focus (performance, size, and more).

  • The Wasmtime runtime recently implemented the reference types proposal, allowing Wasm modules to properly interact with external host objects.

  • This means better integration between a Wasm module and the outside world (DOM APIs when loaded inside a Webpage, or with a database API when instantiated on a server).

  • Thanks to the wasm-smith test case generator, hard-to-find bugs in the wasmparser Rust crate have been fixed Next candidate features are type imports, interface types, module linking, and more.

  • WebAssembly recently became a World Wide Web Consortium recommendation and the fourth language to run natively in browsers, after HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.

  • While WebAssembly’s first major version focused on the browser, WebAssembly is now focusing to non-browser environments to fulfill a variety of computational tasks, where sandboxing, portability or performance are essential.

  • In this context, non-browser-based WebAssembly runtimes are being developed in miscellaneous languages, (Wasmtime and wasmer in Rust, GraalWasm in Java, Lucet in Rust, py-wasm in Python, swam in Scala, and more), with different areas of focus (e.g., performance for wasm3, blockchain applications for eos-vm, small footprint for wasm-micro-runtime).

  • One challenge for these runtimes is to implement and experiment with the new batch of WebAssembly proposals that strive to fulfill WebAssembly’s vision outside the browser.

  • Although Wasmtime is implemented in Rust, the developers maintain APIs for embedding it within various other languages: C, Python, Go & .NET

Wasmer logo Wasmer Python PyPI version Wasmer Python Documentation Wasmer PyPI downloads Wasmer Slack Channel

A complete and mature WebAssembly runtime for Python based on Wasmer.

Features:

  • Easy to use: The wasmer API mimics the standard WebAssembly API,
  • Fast: wasmer executes the WebAssembly modules as fast as possible, close to native speed,
  • Safe: All calls to WebAssembly will be fast, but more importantly, completely safe and sandboxed,
  • Modular: wasmer can compile the WebAssembly modules with different engines or compiler.

Documentation: browse the detailed API documentation full of examples.

Examples as tutorials: browse the examples/ directory, it’s the best place for a complete introduction!