California, Nov. 13, 2019: Mozilla, Intel, Red Hat & Fastly have come together to set-up what is called as ‘The Bytecode Alliance’, an open source community “dedicated to creating new software foundations”. They will be built on standards such as WebAssembly & WebAssembly System Interface (WASI), said the new Foundation in a press note.
So what will this yet-another alliance do?
The Bytecode Alliance, said Mozilla, will deliver a state-of-the-art runtime environment & associated language toolchains, where security, efficiency, & modularity can all coexist across the widest possible range of devices & architectures.
The Bytecode Alliance commitment is to provide a secure platform that allows application developers & service providers to confidently run untrusted code on any infrastructure, for any operating system or device, leveraging decades of experience doing so inside Web browsers.
“WebAssembly is changing the web, but we believe WebAssembly can play an even bigger role in the software ecosystem as it continues to expand beyond browsers. This is a unique moment in time at the dawn of a new technology, where we have the opportunity to fix what’s broken and build new, secure-by-default foundations for native development that are portable and scalable. But we need to take deliberate, cross-industry action to ensure this happens in the right way. Together with our partners in the Bytecode Alliance, Mozilla is building these new secure foundations—for everything from small, embedded devices to large, computing clouds,”
— Luke Wagner, Distinguished Engineer at Mozilla, co-creator of WebAssembly
Developers are running untrusted code in many new places, from the Cloud to the Internet of Things (IoT) devices. But this poses a security risk, so also portability challenges when developers try to run the same code across various systems. The ByteCode Alliance seeks to address these fundamental issues in software development.
Image Credit: ByteCode Alliance
