Language portability is the ability for modules written in one language, like Rust, to run inside a system written in another, like Go. Because WASM runtimes can be embedded within other software, they can be used to introduce specialized components that wouldn’t otherwise be possible in your team’s primary language.

This concept can also be applied to applications that are built by composing together multiple WASM modules written in different languages to form a single piece of software, such as with the Atmo framework, which our company, Suborbital maintains.

WebAssembly is not tied to any hardware architecture, so it can be executed on several different platforms without needing to re-compile. When a WASM module is executed, it is compiled to machine-native code either ahead-of-time (AOT) or just-in-time (JIT).

WASM runtimes such as Chrome’s V8, Wasmtime or Wasmer perform this compilation automatically. I can see this becoming useful in scenarios where your code gets moved automatically from a central cloud instance to an edge compute network when a spike in traffic causes a certain module to be pummeled by incoming requests.

WebAssembly is intended to execute code at native or near-native speeds.

WebAssembly is a representation of your code that can easily be executed in a high-performance manner by optimizing itself for each platform at runtime. We are still in the early days of WebAssembly, but it is already rivaling the performance of the V8 JavaScript engine, which has been optimized over countless years.