Wasm tidbits for September 2025
Sep 19, 2025 2:37 pm
Hi, this is Patrick Dubroy and Mariano Guerra. You're getting this email because you purchased (or signed up for updates about) WebAssembly from the Ground Up. If you're no longer interested in these emails, no hard feelings — you can find an unsubscribe link at the bottom.
Greetings WebAssemblians,
It's been a busy few weeks in the WebAssembly universe! We don't have any book updates for you this time, just a bunch of Wasm tidbits:
- Wasm 3.0 Completed: "Three years ago, version 2.0 of the Wasm standard was (essentially) finished, which brought a number of new features, such as vector instructions, bulk memory operations, multiple return values, and simple reference types. [...] Today, we are happy to announce the release of Wasm 3.0 as the new “live” standard."
- Swift 6.2 was released this week, which is the first version that officially supports WebAssembly. See Getting Started with Swift SDKs for WebAssembly for more details.
- Also in 🍎-land: Safari 26 was released, with a new, in-place interpreter for Wasm. An in-place interpreter is one that operates on the original bytes of the binary module, rather than rewriting them to a different internal format. See Ben Titzer's 2022 paper A fast in-place interpreter for WebAssembly if you're interested to know how this can be done, and what the advantages are.
- Binaryen, an optimizer and compiler infrastructure library for WebAssembly, released v124, with support for some new Wasm features: compilation hints and branch hinting, stack switching, and custom descriptors.
- Orca is a brand new stack for cross-platform applications, based on WebAssembly. In Orca: Changing Tack, Martin talks about his new vision for the project: "The launcher, the runtime, and the development tooling will all be part of the same environment. Orca Apps will be more like SmallTalk images that you can inspect, tweak, and live program, rather than opaque WebAssembly blobs."
- AnyBlox: A Framework for Self-Decoding Datasets.…using "lightweight WebAssembly decoders bundled with the data."
- From $0 to $40M ARR: Inside the tech that powers Bolt.new. An interesting article about WebContainers, the browser-based Node.js runtime that's built on WebAssembly. Featuring Dominic Elm of Learn WebAssembly, another hands-on WebAssembly course that we're fans of!
That's all for today. Take care of yourselves!
— Patrick & Mariano