WebAssembly is garnering a lot of excitement because of it’s unique combination of portability, performance, security, and cross-language support. We’re seeing it used widely across browser, server-side, and IoT use cases. WebAssembly is also seeing adoption from major companies. But what actually is WebAssembly? This talk will crack open the hood of WebAssembly and help demystify what is going on inside at a beginner friendly level.

The core of the talk will focus on understanding what a WebAssembly module is, how it is executed, and how you compile code into WebAssembly. We’ll explore the text and binary representations of a module; the data layout within a module; and understand the basics of how its bytecode instructions operate a stack machine.

Then with an understanding of how WebAssembly works we’ll spend some time briefly learning about the WebAssembly component model. Finally we’ll finish with a demo of why WebAssembly is a great alternative to containers.