WebAssembly, also known as Wasm, is a virtual machine designed for executing general-purpose code. It was first announced in 2015 as a collaboration between major web browser vendors, including Apple, Google, Microsoft, and Mozilla. The original designers envisioned it as a safe and secure execution environment for running untrusted code on the web with near-native performance. WebAssembly was officially released in 2017, accompanied by the paper “Bringing the Web up to Speed with WebAssembly.” Since then, WebAssembly has operated seamlessly across all major browsers.