WASM’s Existential Moment

I’ve been following WebAssembly’s progress (WASM) and its growing number of use cases. For context Web.Dev defines WASM as “a low-level assembly-like language with a compact binary format that runs with near-native performance and provides languages such as C/C++ and Rust, and many more with a compilation target so that they run on the web.”

WASM makes it possible to deliver near-native performance and with more and more programs being built in the cloud, this type of performance is critical to making viable products. Within the community there has been a lot of debate over certain standardizations, specifically their component model. This is a bit of an existential moment for the community as it will provide a lot of clarity to its developer community and should open the doors to a ton of new applications.

It served as a good reminder of how remarkable successful open source communities are at coordination, in an almost exclusively asynchronous manner. Collectively these communities have built some of the most important technologies in the world, used across all sorts of infrastructure and applications that we use today.

In open source ecosystems, all participants can contribute to software enhancement by identifying necessary features and adding code, providing everyone with the chance to make an impact. Without great coordination, progress stalls.

“The strategic marketing paradigm of Open Source is a massively-parallel drunkard's walk filtered by a Darwinistic process.” – Bruce Perens

My hope for their community is that they can continue to coordinate, provide clarity and guidance, and ultimately deliver the component model to unleash the developers.