Lesson 2: Server-Side WASM — WASI, edge computing, and the universal binary

Fri, 11 Oct 2024 00:00:00 +0000

When most people talk about WebAssembly, they mean the browser. That’s where it started, that’s where the tutorials are, and that’s where most of the public discourse still lives. But the more interesting story for backend engineers is what happens when you take the same sandboxed, portable binary model and apply it on the server.

Server-side WebAssembly — specifically WebAssembly with WASI (the WebAssembly System Interface) — is not a toy. Cloudflare Workers runs WASM. Fastly Compute runs WASM. Fermyon Spin is built on it. The pattern is spreading from edge providers into general-purpose infrastructure. Understanding it now puts you ahead of where most backend engineers are.

Lesson 1: WASM from Go — Compile Go to WebAssembly and run it anywhere

Fri, 12 Jul 2024 00:00:00 +0000

I came to WebAssembly skeptically. The pitch — “run code anywhere, at near-native speed, in a sandboxed environment” — sounded like the kind of claim that looks great in a conference talk and falls apart in production. It took a specific use case to make me take it seriously: I needed to run the same validation logic in three environments — a Go backend, a JavaScript frontend, and a CLI tool — without maintaining three separate implementations of the same business rules.

WebAssembly for Backend Engineers on Atharva Pandey

Lesson 2: Server-Side WASM — WASI, edge computing, and the universal binary

Lesson 1: WASM from Go — Compile Go to WebAssembly and run it anywhere