After three years of development, the Bytecode Alliance announced the official release of the WebAssembly runtime – Wasmtime 1.0, ready for production use.

The Bytecode Alliance, founded by Mozilla, Fastly, Intel, and Red Hat, is an organization that promotes the standardization of WebAssembly. The alliance aims to improve the implementation of WebAssembly beyond the browser by collaboratively implementing standards and proposing new standards. ecology. There is an active push for WASI (WebAssembly System Interface), which enables WebAssembly to securely access system resources such as files, network, and memory.

Wasmtime is a WebAssembly runtime developed by the Bytecode Alliance, written in Rust and built on the compiler Cranelift. Wasmtime is completely open source, complies with the WASI standard, and also supports integration with C/C++, Python, .NET, Go and other programming languages, and can run on platforms such as Windows/Linux/macOS.

Bytecode Alliance announced in 1.0 that this version “Fast, secure and production ready”. In addition, the development team also stated that they had considered Wasmtime as production-ready a year ago, but they did not want to just release a WebAssembly engine, but wanted to provide a WebAssembly engine with a high level of speed and security. —— In order to have enough confidence to recommend others to use Wasmtime.

As a result, some Bytecode Alliance members have been running Wasmtime in production for the past year. Wasmtime lived up to the hype, performing well in these production environments, providing a stable platform with security and speed benefits.

According to reports, Shopify has been using Wasmtime in their production environment for up to 14 months. Shopify switched from another WebAssembly engine to Wasmtime in July 2021. After the switch, Shopify’s average execution performance improved by about 50%. Fastly switched from another WebAssembly engine to Wasmtime in March 2022. After the switch, Fastly’s execution time was optimized by about 50%. Additionally, Fastly saw increases in requests per second ranging from 72% to 163%. Fastly also handles trillions of requests using Wasmtime.

Bytecode Alliance mentioned the idea of ​​improving the speed of Wasmtime in the announcement. They said that when optimizing performance, the main focus is on instantiation and runtime performance. For instance, for instantiation, they use two different optimizations: virtual memory and lazy initialization. As for the runtime, they also improved runtime performance through several changes, but the main improvement came from the changes made to the compiler Cranelift, which takes WebAssembly code and converts it to machine code.

The Bytecode Alliance finally talked about the future release plan, they will maintain a frequent and predictable stable version cycle, and a new version of Wasmtime will be released every month. See Release Process for details.

See the release announcement for more.