Why Should You Care About WebAssembly

WebAssembly, fundamentally, is a binary instruction set. It's similar to assembly languages you may have heard of, like x86 or ARM, but with some new characteristics and security guarantees. You write code in a programming language like C or Rust and that code can be compiled into a WebAssembly artifact. As Wasm was initially created for the web, the major appeal was that you could run high performance applications on the web at near-native speeds, though WebAssembly today is experiencing wide adoption outside of the browser as well.

One thing that sets Wasm apart from other compiler targets is its portability. WebAssembly code can be run on any platform so long as there is a runtime for it, regardless of the underlying architecture. This means that developers can write their code once and expect it to run everywhere-whether that's on Windows, macOS, Linux, mobile operating systems, in the browser, or even on a lightbulb.