Wasm is the new CGI | Roborooter.com
I read a wonderful twitter thead about CGI and the birth of the web and this triggered a thought I've been kicking around.
And to be clear I don't mean the Common Gateway Interface as a protocol. I mean what CGI and the cgi-bin application model brought to the web. They allowed people to easily write code that makes websites interactive. This shifted the web from an archive of documents to a vast network of applications. It was the first "web application model". I think Wasm (WebAssembly) is setup to bring the next "web application model" to the industry.
Every shift in common web application models that I've observed over the last 20 years has been towards one goal; High performance applications that are easier to build and maintain. I almost titled this essay as "Wasm is the new serverless" but "serverless" is just the current hot iteration of web application models and not the goal.
I'm going to give a history of web application models and then I'm going to talk about what Wasm brings to the table. I'm seeing a convergence of Wasm related technologies maturing that I think will change some of the fundamental constraints of web application development today. When you change the constraints in a system you enable things that were impossible before.
