Keynote: Deploy WASM on the Edge

### Overview In this keynote address, Brendan Irvine-Broque, Product Manager of Cloudflare Workers at Cloudflare, discusses Cloudflare's approach to running WebAssembly (Wasm) on the edge. Grounded in the guiding mantra of 'run less software' to eliminate undifferentiated heavy lifting, the talk highlights how Cloudflare utilizes web-interoperable standards and V8 to provide serverless compute across a globally distributed network serving millions of requests per second.

### Key Topics - **'Run Less Software' Philosophy**: Emphasizing the removal of grunt work and legacy API complexity in favor of portable, modern abstractions. - **Web-Interoperable Runtimes**: Cloudflare Workers' foundation on Google's V8 engine to bring web platform standards to serverless edge computing. - **Language Bindings and Tooling**: Current usage of `wasm-bindgen` and the `workers-rs` project to write edge workers purely in Rust. - **Standardization and Interoperability**: Transitioning toward WIT (WebAssembly Interface Type) definitions and `wit-bindgen` to avoid manually writing bindings per language. - **Bringing Modern Browser APIs to Serverless**: Introducing emerging browser standards such as WebGPU, WebTransport, and WebRTC into edge environments.

### Technical Details Cloudflare Workers operates as a full-stack serverless platform handling millions of requests per second. The runtime is built directly on V8, making it inherently aligned with browser web standards. Using `workers-rs` and `wasm-bindgen` (specifically the `web-sys` crate), developers can author edge functions entirely in Rust that interact with services like Cloudflare KV (key-value storage) and D1 (relational SQL database).

To move beyond language-specific bindings, Cloudflare is focusing on WIT specifications and `wit-bindgen`. This approach allows bindings to be generated consistently across multiple programming languages rather than relying on unsustainable language-by-language implementations. Additionally, Cloudflare is integrating advanced web standards into its open-source runtime, `workerd` (Cloudflare Worker D), including the WebGPU API to expose GPU access within serverless functions. By making browser APIs such as WebGPU, WebTransport, and WebRTC available on the edge runtime, developers can leverage existing web APIs from WebAssembly via generated bindings.

### Takeaways Cloudflare's strategy focuses on deep web interoperability, enabling portability between client and server environments. While tools like `wasm-bindgen` provide robust production capabilities today, future scalability across diverse languages depends on emerging standards like WIT, `wit-bindgen`, and cross-platform WASI standards (such as standardized key-value access). Developers and runtime implementers are encouraged to collaborate on these specifications to build seamless, portable edge architectures.