The development of the system interface of WebAssembly (Wasm), which has been an official W3C standard since the end 2019, is no longer operated by Mozilla. In future, the browser manufacturer will limit itself to maintaining the browser variant of the bytecode format including the associated runtime environment for execution in web browsers.

Fastly leads Wasmtime and Lucet teams together The specialists previously employed by Mozilla for the desktop variant and the system interface are now switching to Fastly, a provider of cloud computing services. The background is the mass layoffs announced in August at Mozilla, which (in contrast to the Rust project) affect this team.

The Bytecode Alliance celebrates its one-year existence now announced the change of the former Mozilla team, which specializes in Wasm outside the web, in a blog post and mentions that the developers of Lucet and Wasmtime at Fastly will form a team together in the future. This part of the announcement should come as little surprise, as Fastly had already announced in March 2020 that Lucet and Wasmtime are working together on a stronger compiler.

Development of the Wasm ecosystem beyond the browser continued Mozilla, Fastly and Red Hat founded an open source community called the Bytecode Alliance a year ago with the aim of to promote the development of WebAssembly into an independent ecosystem outside of the browser and to set new, cross-platform standards.

The association is currently responsible for eight projects for the execution of WebAssembly outside the browser – including Lucet and WebAssembly Micro Runtime and Runtimes Wasmtime. The aim of the projects maintained by this association is to create secure applications, since a large part of the code of modular apps is made available by individuals via package administrations such as npm, PyPI and crates.io. WebAssembly and especially its desktop version should make the use of these resources more secure. Under the hood, it’s about nanoprocesses that are secured in a sandbox