Intro to Wasm and Wasm containers

Introducing to WebAssembly

Wasm is a new type of application that is smaller, faster, and more portable than traditional Linux containers. However, traditional Linux containers can do a lot more than Wasm apps. For example, Wasm apps are currently great for AI workloads, serverless functions, plugins, and edge devices but not so good for complex networking or heavy I/O.

However, Wasm is evolving fast and may become better at other workloads in the future.

Digging a little deeper…

As we’re about to see, Wasm is a new virtual machine architecture that programming languages compile to. So, instead of compiling apps to Linux on ARM or Linux on AMD, you compile them to Wasm. You can then run these Wasm apps on any system with a Wasm runtime. Fortunately, Docker Desktop already ships with several Wasm runtimes.

Checking installed WASM runtimes

Run the following command to see the list of Wasm runtimes installed as part of your Docker Desktop environment. The first time you run the command, it will download the image.