Think of WASM as a JVM alternative, but it has heavy sandboxing. By default, WASM is pure computing. It can't interact with the outside world. You need to allo

Think of WASM as a JVM alternative, but it has heavy sandboxing. By default, WASM is pure computing. It can't interact with the outside world. You need to allow WASM to talk to the outside world explicitly. You have native performance. It's fast. It's platform-independent, and multiple languages can compile to WASM. The properties lead to some useful applications. Serverless, FaaS. If you use WASM for Serverless you get very fast execution + cold starts. Cloudflare Workers can do 200ms cold starts and 20ms a request. Fastly Cloud@Edge not being a Chrome browser, but instead, its own runtime can do better and serve requests in 10ms. The low overhead and secure sandboxing means you can bin-pack these at a massive scale and call them with little overhead. It's much more efficient than Lambda etc. Cloudflare and Fastly as edge CDN providers allow you to deploy fast apps, globally distributed by default, piggyback off their existing caching functionality with no need for API gateways/complex plumbing etc. Fastly's C@E is especially interesting. Unfortunately, Fastly have failed to capitalise on it product-wise. As a product, Cloudflare is way ahead. The best tech doesn't win. I'm not disparaging Cloudflare here. I personally use Cloudflare over Fastly because, at this point, Cloudflare are a more complete product/ecosystem with superior pricing model. For serverless, it's early days but WASM/WASI will probably disrupt the current FaaS providers once the rough edges are worked out. I wish Fastly had a better product/business execution team to realise C@E properly. Outside of Serverless/FaaS it makes massive sense instead of people deploying full OS's in a Docker image on Kubernetes, instead deploy WASM modules. Wasmcloud (https://wasmcloud.dev/ https://wasmcloud.dev/) looks to be one of the first here running an actor system in Kuberenetes where the Actors are WASM apps. The other place where it has big potential is to be the Electron from hardware devices. Here's a talk for building a WebAssembly runtime for IPlayer https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=28paRXqI-Gk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=28paRXqI-Gk . They essentially made the bulk of the logic/app in Webassembly then created small shims for different devices to load it. Webassembly allowed the hardware providers to offer a portable runtime that can execute 3rd party software in a restricted runtime. WebAssembly in the browser is the least exciting part about WebAssembly. I'm incredibly excited to see how it is used for Microservices and serverless.