Deconstructing WebAssembly Components by Ryan Levick @ Wasm I/O 2024

Wasm I/O 2024 / 14-15 March 2024

WebAssembly (Wasm) Components are the next evolution of the Wasm spec. They offer the ability to interact with Wasm through high-level, idiomatic, auto-generated bindings in the programming language of your choice in a highly composable way. But how do they actually work?

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In this session, we’ll start with a Wasm component created using the latest high-level tooling and slowly peel back the layers unpacking how components work at an increasingly lower-level. Along the way, you’ll become familiar with many of the tools you can use to inspect, create, manipulate and more deeply understand Wasm components. We’ll take a look at components from all angles including Wasmtime’s (a popular Wasm runtime ) API for interacting with components, the wit-bindgen tool which generates code for interacting with a component in the language of your choice, and even what components look like at the binary level through the wasm-tools suite.

By the end you’ll have a much deeper understanding of what Wasm components are, what they’re capable of, and how you might interact with them.