Wasmex: Run WebAssembly Programs in Elixir - Philipp Tessenow | ElixirConf EU 2025

CodeSync · September 16, 2025, 1:00pm

This talk was recorded at ElixirConf EU 2025. If you’re curious about our upcoming event, check https://elixirconf.eu

Abstract:
WebAssembly is a compilation target and execution environment often used in Browsers to speed up intensive algorithms that would be slow in pure JavaScript.
But Elixir can run WebAssembly too and it’s about much more just speedy code execution.
In this session, we will talk about wasmex, a WebAssembly runtime written in Elixir. We investigate common use cases of WebAssembly and how they benefit Elixir hosts. If you are interested in running unsafe (user-provided) programs in your Elixir application, or you want to interface with programs written in other programming language, or even in speeding up your algorithms, this talk is for you.
In addition to interesting use cases and examples, we investigate the architecture of wasmex and examine tradeoffs that need to be considered when running WebAssembly payloads.

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