Why I Started Wasm IL
I started hearing about WebAssembly a couple of years ago. At first it didn’t attract my interest. I thought it was something like a JavaScript framework. But then I got interested in Rust and stumbled upon an article about compiling Rust to WebAssembly.
That’s when it occurred to me that WebAssembly had huge potential outside of the browser.
And then WASI got released and Solomon Hykes (the founder of Docker) tweeted this:
If WASM+WASI existed in 2008, we wouldn't have needed to created Docker. That's how important it is. Webassembly on the server is the future of computing. A standardized system interface was the missing link. Let's hope WASI is up to the task! https://t.co/wnXQg4kwa4
— Solomon Hykes (@solomonstre) March 27, 2019
Solomon may be exaggerating - or he may be totally on point. But seeing the kind of disruption that containers brought to software industry - I knew I had to look deeper into WASM.
And then - Envoy WASM extensions landed - showing how WebAssembly can become a great extensibilty platform for polyglot interoperability.
And more recently - Krustlet was released by Microsoft. Bringing WASM wrokloads ever closer to the cloud-native terrain where I spend so much of my time.
Because of all of the above - a couple of months ago I started the Israeli WebAssembly meetup group. With the purpose of “discussing, learning and developing this exciting new technology together”.
We already have 95 members and held our first virtual meetup on 08/06 with a great presentation by Shachar Langbeheim and a talk on Envoy+WASM+Rust from yours truly. The attendance was great - we had 22 folks online - listening, asking questions, participating!
Next Monday (June 22nd) we are holding our second event - with none other but Alon Zakai - one of the original creators of Emscripten and asm.js and the creator of Binaryen. Alon is the person that makes compiling stuff to WebAssembly possible and easy. His talk is titled “WebAssembly and the Elusive Universal Binary” and I’m sure it will be eye-opening to anyone interested in modern software techonlogies.
The meetup itself will be conducted in Hebrew, but Alon’s talk will be in English.
So what are you waiting for? Join our group and regsiter for the meetup! And may the universal binary light your way!
