Microsoft joins power-packed tech alliance to find new uses for WebAssembly
Bytecode Alliance is now a registered non-profit
When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.
Microsofthas joined the list of tech heavyweights in the Bytecode Alliance, centered around theWebAssemblyopen standard.
WebAssembly was conceptualized as a means to enable browsers to execute compiled programs directly. This allowed developers to have their applications in C, C++ and Rust and run at native speed within a browser, as opposed to porting them toJavaScript.
Soon however the developers realized that WebAssembly’s technical properties, particularly memory isolation, which allows untrusted code components to interact with trusted code inside of a sandboxed environment, the open standard has a wide variety of potential use cases outside of the web browser.
Non-profit alliance
This was the primary motivation forMozilla, Red Hat,Inteland Fastly to come together and form theBytecode Alliance in 2019, to extend the WebAssembly and other related open standards such as the WebAssembly System Interface (WASI) to a broader set of environments.
The alliance contends that WebAssembly and WASI help build the foundation that developers can leverage to run untrusted code securely across various deployments, from thecloudto Internet of Things (IoT) devices on the edge.
The alliance has since welcomed several other tech industry majors into their fold, including Microsoft,Arm, andGoogle.
“WebAssembly and the emerging WebAssembly System Interface (WASI) specification enable cloud-native solutions to become more secure by default and help solve computing challenges across a variety of environments, including the ‘tiny edge’ of systems-on-a-chip (SoCs) and microcontroller units (MCUs),” said Ralph Squillace, principal program manager, Azure Core Upstream, at Microsoft and Bytecode Alliance board member in a statement.
Are you a pro? Subscribe to our newsletter
Sign up to the TechRadar Pro newsletter to get all the top news, opinion, features and guidance your business needs to succeed!
ViaThe Register
With almost two decades of writing and reporting on Linux, Mayank Sharma would like everyone to think he’sTechRadar Pro’sexpert on the topic. Of course, he’s just as interested in other computing topics, particularly cybersecurity, cloud, containers, and coding.
7 myths about email security everyone should stop believing
Best Usenet client of 2024
This super-cheap HP Victus 15 gaming laptop just dropped to its lowest price yet
