WebAssembly Adoption: It’s Complicated, Says CNCF Survey
WebAssembly has traveled a rocky road to adoption in its seven years of existence, especially given its promise of “build once, run anywhere.” A new survey from the Cloud Native Computing Foundation unpacks some of the reasons why the relationship between Wasm and developers remains complicated.
Experience with WebAssembly, a low-level assembly-like language with a compact binary format that runs in near-native performance, actually declined since the CNCF’s previous annual survey. Excluding the 18% of respondents who couldn’t answer the question, 57% of respondents said they had no experience with the technology in 2023, compared with 50% who said the same in 2022.
However, those data points don't tell the whole story. It's possible, given other findings, that the scale of usage by organizations that have adopted Wasm has increased, and that those teams are making more use of Wasm-related vendor products.
For instance: Many more survey participants reported using WebAssembly runtimes in 2023 than in 2022.
The report used responses from 988 participants, collected from August through December 2023, to generate its findings.
Wasm Adoption: Pros and Cons
The reasons why WebAssembly hasn't been more widely adopted remain elusive. One in four survey participants weren't sure why they're not using Wasm; an additional 39%, however, said WebAssembly isn't applicable to their organization's needs.
Those survey participants who are using WebAssembly touted some of its benefits, most notably its faster execution of code (cited by 47%), cross-platform compatibility (46%) and improved security (45%).
However, using Wasm does require making adjustments to the software development life cycle. Among organizations that use both WebAssembly and CI/CD tools to deploy applications, 44% said they have added additional steps to their CI/CD process in order to test Wasm code.
Perhaps one of the more encouraging findings for WebAssembly champions is the speed with which more Wasm adopters find they can transition a project to the technology. The overwhelming majority, 71%, said they can make the switch within a month. Nearly one in four — 23% — said they can do so in five days or less.
