Tomer from SDF and Deanne from Cubist discuss WebAssembly's role in Soroban smart contracts, covering design decisions around WASM 1.0, interpreter vs. compiler tradeoffs, Rust as the primary language, and security considerations for WASM runtimes.
In this conversation between Tomer (VP Product at SDF) and Deanne (Cubist co-founder and security researcher), they explore why Stellar chose WebAssembly for Soroban instead of existing smart contract platforms. Key topics include WASM's formal semantics and portability benefits, the tension between browser and non-browser use cases, Soroban's optimization choices like using an interpreter for compact code, the component model for inter-program communication, Rust as the ideal WASM source language, and security characteristics of WASM runtimes. They discuss future directions including ahead-of-time compilation, emerging languages like Zig, and the importance of proper runtime implementation to maintain sandbox integrity.
