WasmGC in Wasmtime

This article discusses the introduction of WasmGC (Garbage Collection) in Wasmtime, the flagship WebAssembly runtime outside of browsers, used by cloud providers like Fastly and Akamai for sandboxed code execution. It explains how WebAssembly traditionally required garbage-collected languages to ship their entire GC, leading to inefficiencies and memory leaks across JavaScript boundaries. WasmGC, standardized in 2025 and already shipped in Firefox and Chrome, addresses these issues by providing native GC support. The article highlights the significance for cloud-native WebAssembly deployments and the evolution of WebAssembly beyond browser environments.