The Bytecode Alliance is very happy to announce a significant milestone for both Wasmtime and the Bytecode Alliance: Wasmtime has officially been promoted to become the BA’s first Core Project. As someone deeply involved in Wasmtime and the proposal process, I’m incredibly excited to share this news and what it signifies.

Defining Core Projects

Within the Bytecode Alliance, we’ve established two tiers for the projects under our umbrella: Hosted and Core. While all projects in the BA, Hosted and Core alike, are required to drive forward and align with our mission and operational principles, Core Projects represent the flagships of the Alliance.

This distinction isn’t merely symbolic. Core Projects are held to even more rigorous standards concerning governance maturity, security practices, community health, and strategic alignment with the BA’s goals. You can find the detailed criteria in our Core and Hosted Project Requirements. In return for meeting these heightened expectations, Core Projects gain direct representation on the Bytecode Alliance Technical Steering Committee (TSC), playing a crucial role in guiding the technical evolution of the Alliance. Establishing this tier, and having Wasmtime be the first project to meet its requirements, is a vital step in maturing the BA’s governance structure.

Wasmtime: A Natural Fit as the Inaugural Core Project

Wasmtime is a fast, scaleable, highly secure, and embeddable WebAssembly runtime in wide use across many different environments.

From its inception, Wasmtime was designed to embody the core tenets of the Bytecode Alliance. Its focus on providing a fast, secure, and standards-compliant WebAssembly runtime aligns directly with the BA’s mission to create state-of-the-art foundations emphasizing security, efficiency, and modularity.

Wasmtime has been instrumental in turning the Component Model vision of fine-grained sandboxing and capabilities-based security – what we initially called “nanoprocesses” – into a practical reality. It has consistently served as a proving ground for cutting-edge standards work, particularly the Component Model and WASI, driving innovation while maintaining strict standards compliance. Our commitment to robust security practices, including extensive fuzzing and a rigorous security response process, is non-negotiable.

The journey to Core Project status involved formally documenting how Wasmtime meets these stringent requirements. You can find this documentation in our proposal for Core Project status, which provides evidence for the Wasmtime project’s mature governance, security posture, CI/CD processes, community health, and widespread production adoption. Based on this evidence and the TSC’s strong recommendation, the Board of Directors unanimously agreed that Wasmtime not only fulfills the criteria but is strategically vital to the Alliance’s success, making it the ideal candidate to become the first Core Project.

Re-Joining the TSC

After the Core Project promotion, the Wasmtime core team has appointed me to represent the project on the TSC, so I re-joined the TSC in this new role.

More Information

You can find more information about Wasmtime in a number of places:

And you can join the conversation in the Bytecode Alliance community’s chat platform, which has a dedicated channel for Wasmtime.