WebAssembly, but not just for the web!

WebAssembly is an up and coming technology thats seen quite some hype around it. The promise of being able to run C/C++ or even Rust code directly within your browser for near native speeds sounds amazing. But as of late there has been considerable effort to use wasm outside the web browser.

Currently WebAssembly in the web embedding so to say has reached some level of maturity.

I'll be discussing the current state of wasm outside the web embedding and how what is essentially a bytecode format for web browsers is has evolved through runtimes like WasmEdge to enable the running of LLMs locally and software like YOLO vision models on edge devices, apart from other use cases such as executing smart contracts, smart device apps, AI inferencing(a lot of which are enabled by various plugins)

I'll also talk a bit about the current limitations of WebAssembly outside the web embedding(and a small comparission with how its being used in the web embedding), what the nuances are amidst all the hype of WebAssembly and what the current ground reality is of this very new technology.

I'll also talk in brief about WASI(WebAssembly system interface) and what it means for the future of wasm outside web embeddings with the introduction of wasi preview 2 and how its changing the course of development for wasm.

I'll also briefly explore my capstone project in Uni which involves getting k8s and wasm to work together(this is a heavy WIP) on edge device clusters.

This may be a lot to read, but a lot of this is actually simple and can be fit into a lightning talk.