4 Big Developments in WebAssembly
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At Wasm I/O in Barcelona and KubeCon in Paris, several updates regarding WebAssembly (Wasm) were announced. From these, four big patterns emerged.
Since its inception, the biggest risk to Wasm’s success has been lack of support from programming languages. Even the best cross-platform bytecode format cannot succeed if no languages compile to that format.
I’ve been keeping track of language support in WebAssembly for a long time. In particular, I track how many of the top 20 languages, according to RedMonk, are adopting WebAssembly. Python, JavaScript/TypeScript, Ruby, Rust, C/C++ and Zig have all made the Wasm move, and other languages are on their way.
At Wasm I/O, JetBrains’ Zalim Bashorov reported on the rapid progress of Kotlin. In addition to being a popular language in its own right, Kotlin represents the most progressive elements of the Java world. With Kotlin nearing WebAssembly core support and WASI 0.2 support, I expect that the popularity of the language will gain another boost as it finds a new target developer audience. More than that, it will draw the larger Java community toward WebAssembly.
