The Tech of Tomorrow

WebAssembly is currently a 1.0 product, having just reached its first MVP (Minimum Viable Product). As with most 1.0 products, it’s bound to experience some growing pains and points of friction, and we’ll go over those in depth as they come up in this book. As you look at the current state of WebAssembly and its limitations, you might get discouraged and feel the urge to give up and wait for things to get more mature. But I think the time is right to start learning and developing with this incredible new technology, and there are already many WebAssembly 1.0 products deployed and running in the wild and more appearing every day. In the span between two edits of this chapter, someone released a virtual machine built in WebAssembly that runs Windows 95 in a browser.

The good news is that the experience will only improve over time. The tooling will get better, the interface between the browser and WebAssembly modules will get better, support for non-browser hosts will get better, and the number of tested and proven use cases will grow. In short, as time goes on, every aspect of the development of WebAssembly modules will improve.

I am convinced that WebAssembly is at the tip of the next wave of truly paradigm-shifting changes in the programmable Internet. I did indeed mean to say Internet and not just web. The distinction might seem subtle, but I’m also thoroughly convinced that the browser as a host for WebAssembly modules is just the tip of the iceberg. WebAssembly is going to join the long line of game-changing innovations in the history of the Internet and fundamentally alter our concept of applications.