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WebAssembly (Wasm)

TechTerm

WebAssembly (Wasm) is a portable, low-level binary format standardised by the W3C, designed to run code at near-native performance in the browser — and now well beyond.

WebAssembly (Wasm) is a portable, low-level binary format standardised by the W3C, designed to run code at near-native performance in the browser — and now well beyond.

Wasm is a compilation target for languages like Rust, C/C++, Go, Zig or AssemblyScript. It lets you bring to the Web applications historically reserved for the desktop (Figma, Photoshop Web, AutoCAD Web).

Outside the browser, Wasm is becoming a universal runtime for edge serverless (Cloudflare Workers, Fastly Compute, WasmEdge), extensible plugins (Envoy, Istio, Shopify Functions) and serverless functions with near-zero cold start. The WASI standard opens access to the filesystem and network outside the browser.

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