Liam Crilly, Senior Director of Product Management at NGINX, discusses the potential of WebAssembly and its promise of universal portability. WebAssembly is more mature on the client side, lacking sufficient runtimes and toolchains on the server side. Despite the need for a virtual machine, WebAssembly provides near-native compute performance through additional layers of optimization. The chapter explores the pipeline concept, server-side WebAssembly, and the power of Rust and WebAssembly for server-side web apps. WebAssembly functions as a standalone computer with potential for various tasks.
