Who’s Leading WebAssembly Adoption? So Far, Vendors

WebAssembly (Wasm) adoption is being led by tool developers with a vested interest in the technology’s success, according to a new survey.

Among the 303 Wasm users surveyed in the third annual “State of WebAssembly” report, 41% work for an organization that uses Wasm in production, but usage varied based on whether or not WebAssembly is a key part of their role.

Fifty-five percent of respondents said they are personally developing a Wasm runtime, or work for a vendor or service provider that does. By contrast, only 35% of end users said they work for an organization that uses Wasm in production applications.

The survey was conducted again by Colin Eberhardt, who is CTO at Scott Logic, a software consultancy, and the publisher of WebAssembly Weekly. Overall, 57% of respondents were end users, while 31% fit into the tool developer category — with the remainder saying they considered themselves to be hobbyists.

Web development continues to be the top use case for Wasm, cited by 71% of respondents, followed by use as a plug-in environment (32%) and backend services (excluding serverless) (24%).

Compared to last year’s results, significantly fewer have serverless use cases (36% last year vs. 13% in 2023) because the backend services category was added in 2023. Perhaps this indicates that supposed “serverless” activity may not actually be using Functions as a Service.

Language Adoption

Rust continues to be the top language used when developing an application that uses Wasm, but JavaScript and Zig saw significant increases. Here are a few more language-related takeaways:

• Rust is used by 69% of respondents at least occasionally, with almost half of that usage being described as frequent. When asked which languages they want to use with Wasm in the future, three-quarters said they want to use Rust either "a lot" (52%) or "a little" (23%). Those wanting to use Zig to some extent jumped from 28% in 2022's survey to 46% in the new report.
• JavaScript saw a sharp increase in usage, going from 41% in 2022 to 52% in 2023. At the same time, those survey participants who said they plan future use of JavaScript with Wasm rose slightly from 45% to 52%.
• Zig usage rose from 10% to 25% compared to the 2022 survey. Those wanting to use Zig to some extent with Wasm jumped from 28% to 46%.
• The desire to use Blazor/C# (36% in 2022 to 26% in 2023) and AssemblyScript (49% in 2022 to 36% in 2023) fell significantly year-over-year.

Other Takeaways

• Runtime Adoption Rises
  • Use of the Wasm runtimes rose across the board in 2023, with 67% using one of the runtimes asked about in 2023, up from 46% in 2022.
  • Wasmtime is used by 50% of respondents, up from 36% in 2022, followed by Wasmer (40%, up from 36%), Wasm3 (18%, up from 14%), WasmEdge (15%, up from 7%), and WebAssembly Micro Runtime (WAMR) (12%, up from 6%). Wazeroo is used by 12% and it was not asked about in previous surveys.

• Impatience with WASI
  • Only 28% of respondents are satisfied with the continued evolution of WebAssembly System Interface (WASI), while 35% are not satisfied.
  • In comparison, 46% are satisfied with WebAssembly's evolution as compared to only 26% being dissatisfied.