Speeding Up the Development for the Computing Continuum with WebAssembly

WebAssembly is a lightweight binary format that achieves portable software across heterogeneous compute nodes in the computing continuum. One of its main drawbacks is the limited availability of pre-packaged software, in comparison to larger ecosystems, as it is instead the case with container registries or programming language package repositories. A transpilation approach might close this gap. However, it requires overcoming several technical issue dealing with native code execution. This work assesses the current transpilation technologies and the reduction of deployment friction. We report about the state of technology and contribute three advancements: (i) a compilation pipeline for Python applications using componentize-py and wasi-wheels, enabling native extension support; (ii) exploitation of hardware accelerators in Wasm via WASI-nn, and (iii) seamless cross-language composition using WebAssembly Interface Types (WIT). We demonstrate the effectiveness of our result with two real-world applications in a 3-zones continuum, highlighting faster development without compromising software dependability. We support experimental reproducibility and release our prototype and dataset as open-source.