Wasmer 2.2 revs compiler, supports Apple M1 and Aarch64

Wasmer 2.2, the latest version of the open source server-side runtime for the WebAssembly binary instruction format, has arrived with “major improvements” to the Singlepass compiler including new hardware support.

Announced February 27, Wasmer 2.2 reintroduces Aarch64 compatibility for Wasmer’s Singlepass compiler and introduces Apple M1 processor support. The overhaul of Singlepass means that Web3 and blockchain developers can efficiently run Wasmer with Singlepass on Linux, Windows, and MacOS, the Wasmer team wrote in a note on the release.

Singlepass performance also has been improved. For x64_64 on Linux, for example, the Wasmer developers said Singlepass performance between version 0.17 and version 2.0 has increased roughly 25 percent.

Instructions for installing the Wasmer standalone runtime can be found at docs.wasmer.io. The Wasmer 2.1 release, published last November, introduced a refactor of Singlepass to enable a new, straightforward back-end implementation. With Aarch64 compatibility, Singlepass promises to be more powerful, flexible, and useful, the Wasmer team said. But Wasmer still needs to be tested “in the wild” against production workloads. Users are asked to download Wasmer 2.2 and provide feedback on how it is working at the Wasmer Slack channel.

Wasmer allows developers to run WebAssembly modules, either standalone or embedded, within other languages such as C/C++, Rust, PHP, Go, and Python. Wasmer is designed to allow programs to be written in any language and portable binaries to be run unmodified on supported OSes such as Linux or Windows. Wasmer also acts as a secure bridge for Wasm (WebAssembly) modules to interact with native OS functionality via ABIs such as WASI or Emscripten.