Research on WebAssembly Runtimes: A Survey

TL;DR

This article provides a comprehensive survey of research on Wasm runtimes with 103 collected research papers related to Wasm runtimes following the traditional systematic literature review process and characterizes existing studies from two different angles.

Abstract

WebAssembly (abbreviated as Wasm) was initially introduced for the Web but quickly extended its reach into various domains beyond the Web. To create Wasm applications, developers can compile high-level programming languages into Wasm binaries or manually convert equivalent textual formats into Wasm binaries. Regardless of whether it is utilized within or outside the Web, the execution of Wasm binaries is supported by the Wasm runtime. Such a runtime provides a secure, memory-efficient, and sandboxed execution environment designed explicitly for Wasm applications. This paper provides a comprehensive survey of research on WebAssembly runtimes. It covers 98 articles on WebAssembly runtimes and characterizes existing studies from two different angles, including the "internal" research of Wasm runtimes(Wasm runtime design, testing, and analysis) and the "external" research(applying Wasm runtimes to various domains). This paper also proposes future research directions about WebAssembly runtimes.

Figures (21)

• Figure 1: Wasm runtime publications (accumulative) during 2017-2024. (The publication count for the year 2024 is recorded up to January 8th.)
• Figure 2: Tree structure of the contents in this paper.
• Figure 3: Wasm workflow inside the Web.
• Figure 4: Wasm workflow outside the Web.
• Figure 5: The conversion between Wasm binaries and textual format.