// HACKER NEWS — CYBERSECURITY
Engineering of the fastest WebAssembly interpreters
In my last post about Wasmi 1.0 I promised a fundamental engine overhaul for the future Wasmi version. The future is now! 1
Wasmi is an efficient and feature-rich WebAssembly (Wasm) interpreter.
It is an excellent choice for IoT devices, plugin systems (Typst, Zellij, Josh), cloud hosts, smart contracts (Soroban, Ripple) and even for your lightweight game consoles (Firefly Zero).
Before going into all the details, a huge thank you to the Stellar Development Foundation (SDF) that has been sponsoring the Wasmi project since October 2024. Without their sponsorship, the Wasmi project wouldn’t be where it is today.
Also special thanks to Felix Kutzner for proofreading the article and suggesting many improvements.
Today, I am happy to announce that after eight months of focused work, Wasmi 2.0 is finally done and ready to use.
This release focuses on execution performance: Wasmi 2.0 runs ~2.2x faster than Wasmi 1.0 in geometric mean across the wasmi-benchmarks suite on an Apple M2 Pro.
Wasmi 2.0 also ships new knobs, such as the validate crate feature, that significantly reduce its binary artifact size. 2
Some user-requested features, such as stable fuel metering 3, support for WebAssembly’s deterministic profile and an improved Wasmi CLI tool, also made it into this release.
You can always make me happy with a star at GitHub!
2.2x faster than Wasmi 1.0 is great, but how does Wasmi 2.0 fare against its competition?
For this, I have benchmarked Wasmi 2.0 against some of the fastest portable Wasm interpreters: 4
Note: Wasmi 2.0 was inspired by all the interpreters above!