WebAssembly Reading List

I’m giving a talk titled “What Actually Is WebAssembly” at Cloud Native Rejekts 2023. As part of my talk I want to help people further explore the world of WebAssembly. This is a list of blog posts, documentation, and videos that I think might be interesting to someone who is learning about WebAssembly. I’ll do my best to keep this up to date. Without further ado here is my WebAssembly reading list.

Mozilla Developer Network WebAssembly Docs

These are the gold standard of entry-level WebAssembly documentation. It’s particularly useful if you’re interested in using Wasm in the browser or if you’re interested in learning about the WebAssembly text format in depth.

Standardizing WASI: A system interface to run WebAssembly outside the web

WASI is exciting because it is bringing so much functionality to WebAssembly. This blog post is a great introduction to WASI and why it is important. If you like Lin Clark’s comic style explainers I recommend you check out all of her work.

Luke Wagner on the WebAssembly Component Model

Luke Wagner gave a great talk at WasmCon 2023 about what the WebAssembly component model is. He’s a fantastic speaker and the component model has the potential to rethink how we write software.

The WebAssembly Specification

Don’t let the fact that this is a technical specification scare you. It is really well written and quite a short read if you skip all the formal notation. There’s nothing quite like going to the primary source.

Fermyon Guide to WebAssembly Languages

Fermyon¹ maintains a fantastic resource outlining support for WebAssembly across the top 20 programming languages.