Ruby has joined the ranks of languages capable of targeting WebAssembly with its latest 3.2 release. This seemingly minor update might be the biggest thing that has happened to the language since Rails, as it lets Ruby developers go beyond the back end. By porting their code to WebAssembly, they can run it anywhere: on the front end, on embedded devices, as serverless functions, in place of containers, or on the edge. WebAssembly has the potential to make Ruby a universal language.
What Is WebAssembly?
WebAssembly (commonly shortened as Wasm) is a binary low-level instruction format that runs on a virtual machine. The language was designed as an alternative to JavaScript. Its aim is to run applications on any browser at near-native speeds. Wasm can be targeted from any high-level language like C, Go, Rust, and now also Ruby.