Highly recommend this medium article. “Wasm goes a step further to provide an abstraction over modern hardware” -Andreas Rossberg, DFINITY
While OS abstractions turned out to be a poor choice for building distributed systems, programming language abstractions make much more sense.(Arpaci-Dusseau and Arpaci-Dusseau, 2018). As the first mainstream programming language which has been designed with formal semantics from the start, Wasm goes a step further to provide an abstraction over modern hardware (Rossberg et al., 2018).