Carnegie Mellon University recently hosted WebAssembly Research Day, bringing together researchers from academia and industry and the W3C Community Group overseeing the standards governing the platform.

More than 60 people attended the June 4 event in person and at times up to 50 people joined the sessions virtually. It was the largest turnout for a WebAssembly Research Day in the event's three-year history and the first time the event was held at a university. 

The research day and community group meeting were organized by CMU's WebAssembly Research Center (WRC), which launched in September 2023 to unite researchers from across the university, other institutions and industry to explore how the platform is used now and how it could be used in the future. Current WRC partners include Woven by Toyota, Shopify, Siemens and DFINITY. Representatives from these organizations and from Google, Mozilla, Apple, Fastly, Fermyon, PNC, Disney, Fujistu, Adobe and more attended.

WebAssembly Research Day included talks and presentations about WebAssembly (Wasm) from researchers at CMU, the Korea Advanced Institute of Science & Technology (KAIST), the University of Luxembourg, DFINITY Foundation, and Fastly. Among the talks, a presentation of the first WebAssembly record-and-replay technique, Wasm-R3, caught people's attention. Wasm-R3 transparently records execution traces from real-world web applications, automatically optimizes and reduces those traces, and produces standalone replay modules executable on any Wasm engine without a host environment. It allows a Wasm application to run outside its native host environment so it can be analyzed and benchmarked under a controlled setting — a breakthrough capability for the platform.

Elizabeth Gilbert, a Ph.D. student in the Software and Societal Systems Department (S3D), gave a talk detailing a new domain-specific language that simplifies instrumenting Wasm applications. Arjun Ramesh, a Ph.D. student in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department, presented research on leveraging Wasm as a debugging platform for resource-constrained systems and dynamic race detection. Chris Fallin, who earned his Ph.D. at CMU and is a software engineer at the cloud computing service provider Fastly, also presented during research day, showing a new application of partial evaluation to make language interpretation on Wasm automatically run up to five times faster.

"People were really excited by the research presented during WebAssembly Research Day," said Ben Titzer, director of the WebAssembly Research Center and a principal researcher in S3D. "The event displayed the increased collaboration between universities, companies and organizations developing for the platform." 

After the research day concluded, the World Wide Web Consortium Community Group met, also at CMU. For two days, members of the community group discussed the standards that govern Wasm, advanced new proposals and voted on the platform's future. Titzer said holding the community group meeting after the research day gave members a chance to hear about the latest Wasm research and increased collaboration opportunities for researchers to have more impact and the standards body to have a longer-term view.

More information about WebAssembly Research Day and the WebAssembly Research Center is available on the WebAssembly Research Center's events page.