WASM being the “new k8s” is only one small fragment of where it is going to go. I think there is a good chance it’s going to become the defacto deployment target for a lot of software, so in addition to browser and server:
- Plugins for desktop/mobile apps, wasm provides a nicely sandboxed environment for them.
- Gaming, the combination of WASM and WebGPU will be the perfect platform for cross platform game development. I could see Steam, for example, creating their own runtime.
- Embedded electronics, simplifying the development and deployment of IoT devices.
When it comes to wasm on the server, it’s often talked about as targeting the “edge”. I believe this the next area of massive growth, however the part that I don’t think is fully solved yet is on the database side. If your server app is making multiple database calls from the edge to a central db there is a good chance that it will slower than a traditional (single location) deployment.
What’s needed is a edge first database, we need at least read replicas to be at the edge with your app. Fly.io have something like this with their Postgres’s product. The alternative is to use an eventually consistent db such as CouchBD, but that causes other problems. I’m interested to see if CloudFlare do anything in this area as it’s the part of their stack that’s missing.
Is WASM going to replace:
Lua, JS and LLV IRM?
No, no, and no. The only one remotely close in scope is LLVM-IR, and even then scope is pretty significantly different. LLVM-IR is a general purpose IR for native compilation. Wasm is deliberately small in scope and designed for sandboxing.
Lua and JS are not even binary languages.