A survey of Web Assembly Runtime Ecosystem

Abstract

WebAssembly is a secure, portable, low-level binary code format that offers efficient execution and compact representation. With the intro- duction of the WebAssembly System Interface, Wasm is expanding beyond its original role as a browser-only technology, finding applications in diverse fields such as generative AI, serverless AI, edge computing, cloud computing, and high-performance computing. Despite the existence of numerous Wasm run- time ecosystems, there is currently no comprehensive overview or taxonomy of these state-of-the-art runtimes and their ecosystems. This paper aims to fill that gap by providing a detailed taxonomy of Wasm runtime ecosystems, ex- amining runtime characteristics and classifying modern Wasm runtimes within this framework.