The Bytecode Alliance organization maintains a very useful website about The WebAssembly Component Model and each associated languages has also a page on it.
Now that I've explained the purpose of the project and its architecture in the previous section, I will focus on concrete examples of implementing multiple languages in the same project and sharing some tips I had to learn the hard way.
Before choosing a language for compiling to WebAssembly, you should consider the impact it has on the final size of your wasm file - here is a comparaison of the size of the echo plugin in the different languages:
| Language | Size |
|---|---|
| C | 56K |
| Rust | 72K |
| Go (with TinyGo) | 332K |
| TypeScript | 12M |
Looking at the table above, the differences in .wasm file size come from the language and how much runtime support it brings:
- C and Rust produce very small files (56K and 72K here) because they compile directly to efficient machine-level code without needing to ship a runtime. Rust is slightly larger due to safety checks and standard library overhead, but both remain compact.
- Go (TinyGo) is larger (332K) because Go normally includes a large runtime. TinyGo reduces this compared to regular Go, but you still pay a higher size cost than C/Rust.
-
TypeScript is much bigger (12M) because it doesn’t compile directly to Wasm. Instead, you’re shipping a whole JavaScript engine runtime inside your
.wasmfile.
I've already covered creating Rust components, let's now focus on C, Go and TypeScript.