BKK.JS #23 - Intro to WASM

1. Intro to WASM Because portability, 'nuff said
2. Karn Wong Loves optimization Has too much fun cranking out benchmarks AWS Community Builder & HashiCorp Ambassador Blog & Portfolio karnwong.me Say hi at Bluesky @karnwong.me Independent Consultant
3. Web Assembly
4. Hardware-agnostic No more linux/amd64 linux/arm64 darwin/amd64 darwin/aarch64 windows/amd64 windows/aarch64 etc
5. Architecture-agnostic Bye-bye incompatible dependencies across architecture
6. Lightweight
7. Client-Side
8. Slower to execute But it’s not always a bad thing
9. Can be executed directly as binary Ex. wasmtime
10. Lightweight footprint Yay for IoT
11. Can be served via CDN No compute required
12. Can be embedded as FFI Great for multi-platform apps* *Google does it: https://web.dev/case-studies/earth-webassembly Core Logic in WASM Swift Kotlin Go Rust Python Frontend
13. Can be packaged into a container image Either directly or as native WASM image* *Ex. WasmEdge container runtime
14. Can stand on CDN infrastructure Or container infrastructure
15. Native vs WASM Implementation https://karnwong.me/posts/2024/12/native-implementation-vs-wasm- for-go-python-and-rust-benchmark/
16. Binary vs Container Size arch binary_size_kb image_size_kb linux/amd64 477 8810 wasm 100 150 Binary size difference: 377% Container size difference: 5773% https://karnwong.me/posts/2025/03/wasm-deployment-benchmark/
17. Native vs FFI Execution Time https://karnwong.me/posts/2025/04/wasm-ffi-performance-benchmark/
18. WASM is great for following scenarios 1. Multi-platform apps - because core logic can be abstracted away as wasm, reducing time to re- implement in target languages 2. A small function is required, but is too hard to implement in javascript This function is easier to implement in another language, but it’s not worth standing up a dedicated api
19. Thank you 🙏 Download slides at: karnwong.me