faasm/faasm

Faasm is a highly sophisticated systems project that addresses the 'stateless' limitation of traditional serverless computing (like AWS Lambda) by implementing a distributed shared memory region accessible by WebAssembly functions. This is a non-trivial engineering feat that provides a significant technical moat compared to standard 'wrapper' projects. With over 900 stars and 7.5 years of development, it represents a mature, research-backed codebase. While it faces competition from newer Wasm-centric platforms like Fermyon (Spin) and wasmCloud, Faasm's specific focus on high-performance state sharing makes it more of a competitor to distributed computing frameworks like Ray or MPI-based systems than simple web-trigger runtimes. The primary risk is platform domination: if major cloud providers (AWS/GCP) integrate native Wasm state management into their serverless offerings, Faasm's niche could shrink. However, for self-hosted, high-performance, or research-intensive distributed workloads, it remains a category-defining tool. Its age and low recent velocity suggest it has reached a level of stability where it is likely used in specific academic or high-end industrial contexts.