Can WebAssembly Be Software’s Final Substrate? (Keynote)

Since the dawn of computing, many formats for executable programs have come and gone. The design of an executable format encounters design choices and tradeoffs such as expressiveness, ease of parsing/decoding/execution, the level of abstraction, and performance. With the advent of WebAssembly, a portable low-level compilation target for many languages, an intriguing question arises: can we finally standardize a universal binary format and software virtual machine? After many years, I believe that we finally can. Unlike language-specific bytecode formats whose abstraction level serves only one language family well, or machine-code formats that serve specific ISAs and operating systems well, WebAssembly sits between these levels of abstraction. In this talk I will share my vision for a future where all software sits on a standardized, well-specified, formally-verified substrate that allows innovation above and below, and unlocks high performance and portability for all programming languages.