Top New Technology Trends for 2023

Why Wasm is the future of cloud computing

Computing Power

Whether on the server or on the edge, Wasm lets you create custom logic that runs much closer to the data than it could before. And you can do it securely, efficiently, and with greater flexibility.
Wasm may just be the most important emerging technology that you’ve never heard of. Ok, maybe you’ve heard of it. It’s important! Shorthand for WebAssembly language, Wasm was developed for the web. However, Wasm technology has expanded beyond the web browser. Now organizations are starting to run Wasm on the server side. For example, my company, SingleStore, is using it in our database.

Wasm is cross-platform: Making it safer and simpler to bring cloud components together

People use all different kinds of languages to write software. Getting those languages to interact with each other is difficult. Wasm provides a framework in which you can write in whatever language you want. Then it produces a common, simulated machine format. That format allows components written in various languages—like Rust, C/C++, and Go—to talk to each other. Wasm also provides the ability for server-side systems like databases to embed components from different languages without requiring you to know or care how that module was produced.

Wasm is secure: Lowering risk with its approach to running code and representing functions

In most language runtimes, functions have addresses. Those addresses are executable points in memory. If you are just looking at memory as a bunch of bytes, a function may be indistinguishable from the rest of the memory. This opens the door for people to find the function and inject code into it, or call a function in a privileged way so the function does something that it’s not supposed to do. Wasm’s design eliminates those problems.

Wasm is fast: Eliminating what is not needed and enabling greater speed and efficiency

Clearly, Wasm isn’t the first technology people have used to bring things together in a safer, more simplified way. However, Wasm is much faster than some of those other technologies. Compilers can generate Wasm programs by leveraging the LLVM back end, compiling down to the LLVM intermediate representation. LLVM, or low level virtual machine, is an extracted machine that many languages already compile down to. As a result of this approach, and thanks to many years of community effort around the LLVM project, Wasm programs can be compiled to highly optimized machine code.

Wasm is getting better all the time: Creating standards makes it even more powerful

Wasm is already very capable. And with the new technologies and standards that are on the way, Wasm will let you do even more. For example, the W3C WebAssembly Community Group, with help from members of organizations such as the Bytecode Alliance (of which SingleStore is a member), is currently working on standardizing the WebAssembly System Interface (WASI). WASI will provide a standard set of APIs and services that can be used when Wasm modules are running on the server. Many standard proposals are still in progress, such as garbage collection, network I/O, and threading, so you can’t always map the things that you’re doing in other programming languages to Wasm. But eventually, WASI aims to provide a full standard that will help to achieve that. In many ways, the goals of WASI are similar to POSIX.

Wasm is the future: Providing a faster, more secure, and more efficient way to bring things together

Wasm, though more lightweight, may not replace containers any time soon. But you can expect Wasm to become part of a whole lot of software going forward.Whether on the server or on the edge, Wasm lets you create custom logic that runs much closer to the data than it could before—and you can do it securely, efficiently, and with greater flexibility.