WasmEdge

WasmEdge Extensions

WasmEdge supports all standard WebAssembly and WASI specifications. In addition, it supports features and APIs that are crucial for the cloud-native use cases. WasmEdge is a superset of standard Wasm. Through its extension SDK, developers can easily add features they need to the WasmEdge Runtime as plugins.

📄️ WebAssembly Proposals

Standard WebAssembly Features

📄️ WasmEdge Plug-ins

For those workloads which are too heavy to compile into WebAssembly, it would be more appropriate to build them into native host functions. To satisfy the portability of WebAssembly runtime, WasmEdge introduced the plug-in mechanism to make the host functions loadable and portable.

📄️ Other Extensions

A challenge for running WASM apps on the server side is the lack of support for Linux APIs and common application libraries. WasmEdge fixes this by adding support for many platform APIs for WASM apps. Developers can often simply compile their Linux apps to WASM and expect it run in WasmEdge. WasmEdge provides an easy extension mechanism for the community to add these APIs. For example,

📄️ Garbage Collection

WasmEdge supports the WebAssembly Garbage Collection (GC) proposal starting from version 0.14.0. This allows high-level languages like Kotlin, Dart, and OCaml to compile to WebAssembly without bundling their own garbage collector, resulting in smaller binaries and better runtime performance.