A Cross-Architecture Evaluation of WebAssembly in the Cloud-Edge Continuum

As cloud-to-edge computing becomes increasingly prevalent, the need for an application framework capable of dynamically utilizing the entire spectrum of resources has grown. As developers increasingly seek to deploy applications across heterogeneous computing environments, this research aims to introduce how WebAssembly(Wasm) emerges as a versatile ally, seamlessly executing on different architectures, allowing developers to craft applications without being bothered by the underlying hardware platform.WebAssembly binaries need a runtime to execute. In this paper, we present a thorough performance analysis of the two most prominent WebAssembly runtimes employing an extensive array of instrumented benchmarks to ensure precise and reliable results. We focus on investigating WebAssembly’s performance characteristics while considering important metrics like execution speed and startup time. Unprecedentedly, we extended the evaluation to four diverse sets of architectures: two server-class architectures (X86_64, ARM64) and two embedded boards (Nvidia Jetson Nano with ARM64, StarFive VisionFive2 with RISCV64), marking the first-ever cross-architecture analysis of WebAssembly runtimes. This novel evaluation empowers us to offer valuable insights into the performance traits and considerations of WebAssembly. By scrutinizing architecture-specific results, we shed light on Wasm’s potential to address the requirements of a cross-architecture cloud-to-edge application framework and reshape the landscape of modern application frameworks.