Modern Websites in a Raspberry Pi Zero with WebAssembly

Cool idea! But I also noticed a lack of support for 32 bit RasPis in many situations. What's a pity for sustainability, since there are still so many old RasPis out there. Wasm could close the gap here and keep the effort for small projects low to support that platform. Now we only need Wasm runtimes that are running properly on ARMv6.

Developer here :)

Exactly, that was the main challenge for this project. We tested different popular runtimes, but none of them could target ARMv6. In the end, we used Wazero, a full runtime implemented in Go.

However, this comes with its own limitations as most of the performance optimizations are not available for 32-bit architectures. In fact, we compared the performance on a Pi Zero 2 using a 32-bit and 64-bit operating system. The different is quite relevant: 6s vs 190ms.

Wasm outside of the browser sounds so promising. Excited to see more edge use cases like this.

Running PHP in WebAssembly is so cool!