For those interested in the prospects of WebAssembly for being able to write "universal apps" that can run anywhere, Wasmer as one of the leading WASM runtimes is closing in on its v5.0 feature release.

Wasmer 5.0-rc1 was released on Monday and ships now with V8 as an experimental back-end for Wasmer. While V8 is most often associated as Google's high performance JavaScript engine used by Chrome, V8 is also a WebAssembly engine. With Wasmer 5.0 is experimental support for using V8 if so desired.

Wasmer 5.0 is also adding an experimental WASMI back-end as another WebAssembly interpreter. WASMI is a lightweight WebAssembly interpreter focused on constrained and embedded systems. Wasmer 5.0-rc1 also adds an interpreter mode if wanting to run WASM modules in an interpreted mode via this WebAssembly runtime.

Wasmer 5.0-rc1 also brings a variety of other changes and fixes as outlined in the project's change-log . Wasmer 5.0-rc1 downloads for the source code as well as various Linux binaries are available from GitHub .