Understanding the fundamentals of Wasm

Wasm is a portable binary format designed to run on virtual machines (VMs), allowing it to run on various computer hardware and digital devices, and is very actively used to improve the performance of web applications. It is a virtual instruction set architecture (ISA) for a stack machine designed to be portable, compact, and secure with a smaller binary file size to reduce download times when executed on web browsers. A modern browser’s JavaScript engines can parse and download the Wasm binary format in order of magnitude faster than JavaScript. All major browser vendors have adopted Wasm, and as per the Mozilla Foundation, Wasm code runs between 10% and 800% faster than the equivalent JavaScript code. It provides faster startup time and higher peak performance without memory bloat.

Wasm is also a preferred and practical choice for building extensions for Envoy for the following reasons:

• Wasm extensions can be delivered at runtime...