The idea of a bytecode that can run anywhere dates back to the JVM inception (as far as I know). WebAssembly is the new implementation of an old idea. While WebAssembly is meant to run in the browser, Docker recently announced its capability to run WASM code without needing containers. In this post, I want to explore how it can work.

Prerequisite

Running WebAssembly is a beta feature and requires using containerd. To enable containerd, go to the Docker Desktop dashboard, then Settings > Features in development > Beta features > Use containerd for storing and pulling images.