A new WebAssembly runtime enters the arena... Is it worthy?
A few minutes ago, I released my brand-new WebAssembly runtime, Wago . There's one massive problem though. Wasmtime is mature, fast, and backed by the Bytecode Alliance . Wasmer has been around for years, V8 speaks wasm fluently, and if you're writing Go, wazero is already the de-facto answer. So why would I be stupid enough to make a new wasm runtime? Seems like all the bases are already…
A new WebAssembly runtime, Wago, has entered the arena, challenging the dominance of existing runtimes like Wasmtime and Wazero. While these established runtimes are impressive, Wago aims to offer better performance and memory efficiency. Wago's creator, who worked at Hypermode and Impart Security, was frustrated by Wazero's slow compilation and execution speeds.
In response, he developed Railshot, the compiler behind Wago, which focuses on using minimal memory while producing fast performance. Wago achieves this by applying a single-pass compilation approach and exploiting the structure of WebAssembly. The results show that Wago is 5.7 times faster to compile, 11 times less memory-hungry during compilation, 70% faster at execution, and 52% smaller in generated machine code compared to its competitors.
Despite being single-pass, Railshot's ingenious design enables it to make smarter decisions while compiling, resulting in improved performance. Wago supports modern WebAssembly (3.0+) and offers a standalone native executable, a plugin system, and AMD64 and ARM64 backends.
Written by urgent.news from Dev.to's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
