Bytecode Alliance Preparing For Wasmtime 1.0 Releasing Later This Month

Formed back in 2019 by Intel, Mozilla, and Red Hat was the Bytecode Alliance to promote running WebAssembly (WASM) everywhere. As part of the Bytecode Alliance initiatives they have been developing Wasmtime as a WebAssembly run-time and later this month they plan to christen version 1.0.

Wasmtime is self-described as "a fast and secure runtime for WebAssembly" that is open-source, built atop the Cranelift code generator, leverages the Rust programming language, and compliant with the WASI standard. Wasmtime can also be integrated with programming languages from Rust to C/C++, Python, .NET, Go, and others. Wasmtime is officially supported across Linux, Windows, and macOS systems. Those wanting to learn more about the project itself can visit Wasmtime.dev.

The Bytecode Alliance is preparing to formally release Wasmtime 1.0 on 20 September. Prior to that v1.0 milestone there has been a push for maximizing the performance potential of this WebAssembly runtime. The Bytecode Alliance summed up in a new blog post:

This post has been a whirlwind tour of many of the ways we have optimized Wasmtime and Cranelift to perform better in each of the four quadrants: Wasm compiler speed, speed of compiled Wasm code, runtime initialization speed, and runtime steady-state speed. High performance is a critical aspect of any software that aspires to be part of a foundation for building efficient, long-lasting systems. If WebAssembly is to succeed, it needs tools that execute it as quickly as possible, so that it can compete with native code. We continue to work toward this goal.

Those wishing to learn more about the Bytecode Alliance's Wasmtime 1.0 performance optimization effort can read their post in full on BytecodeAlliance.org.