Building Hyperlight with a WebAssembly runtime enables any programming language to execute in a protected Hyperlight micro-VM without any prior knowledge of Hyperlight. Program authors are just compiling for the wasm32-wasip2 target, meaning programs can use runtimes such as Wasmtime or Jco, Microsoft said. Programs also can be run on a server for Nginx Unit, Spin, WasmCloud, or, now, Hyperlight Wasm. In an ideal scenario, developers wouldn’t need to think about what runtime their code will run on as they are developing it. Also, by combining Hyperlight with WebAssembly, Microsoft said it was achieving more security and performance than traditional VMs by doing less work overall. Wasmtime provides strong isolation boundaries for Wasm workloads via a software-defined sandbox, Microsoft said.
Plans call for enabling Hyperlight Wasm to work on Arm64 processors. Thus far, planning has centered on using WASI on Hyperlight for portability between operating systems and VMs. But Wasm applications are portable between different instruction sets. Also, Hyperlight Wasm will soon be extended with default bindings for some WASI interfaces.