WebAssembly (a.k.a. Wasm) has been put forth as a new low-level code format for the Web, which is available in all modern browsers. Yet an important design goal was to make it useful beyond “just” the web and applicable as a compilation target for a wide range of programming languages, from low-level to high-level. WebAssembly offers compact representation, fast validation and compilation, and safe execution with minimal overhead. Rather than committing to a specific programming model, it is an abstraction over modern hardware, making it both language- and platform-independent.

In this talk I will give some insights into the goals, the design, the road map, and the future directions of this increasingly misnamed technology.

Andreas Rossberg is one of the designers of WebAssembly, authored its formalisation and specification, and is the champion of various proposals for enhancements. He now is a researcher with the Dfinity Foundation. Until recently he was a software engineer at Google, working on V8, the JavaScript virtual machine. Prior to his move to industry he researched programming language theory and implementation at the Max Planck Institute for Software Systems and at Saarland University.