 Hey everyone. Today I want to talk about what I think is the future of plugins related to WASM. Plugins have been around for a very long time, since pretty much the birth of computing. And I think the best way to think about the future, instead of me sitting up here and making a bunch of bad predictions that will turn out to be wrong, we can just kind of examine some of the past. So I'm going to take you back to the year 1996. Software was sold in boxes still. My parents were taking me to see Independence Day in theaters, a big blockbuster. And the Cubase team was adding a plugin system to their digital audio workstation. If you're not familiar with this music technology, digital audio workstation, or DAW, is basically the control software for a music studio. And the plugins are basically instruments or effects that you can instantiate and connect together in different ways in the system. So in 1996, they created this plugin system. They created their first plugin called Neon. It's a little synthesizer. So let's talk about how this worked. Back then, there was a well-known, well-understood architecture for plugins. Basically, everything was a shared object. The plugins that they made were kind of designed to emulate the hardware rack modules that came before. So basically, the way it worked is that the system exposed these interfaces for chaining together audio and control signals. And the actual code itself was a shared object. So it was native code wrapped in whatever target you had. Like you have a DLL for Windows. You have a DLL for Mac, et cetera. And what glued all this together is basically C header file. And they called this interface in the standard VST. And it was their plugin standard. So yeah, so VST was not the only standard. There were lots of other DAWs out there. They were all creating plugin systems. But VST actually came to dominate the plugin market. And you might ask yourself, why? Why would these big companies like create plugin systems and standards for their DAWs and then adopt VST? Well, I think the reason is basically VST had the best plugins. And there's something interesting that happens. It's kind of like a Turing-complete crossover point where once your plugin is capable of emulating someone else's plugin system, it's kind of a race to the bottom to the best plugins. So what happened was developers, VSTs being the best, developers were able to just virtualize away the other host plugin systems. And that way, they could run VSTs everywhere. And from here, it created kind of a flywheel effect. Because now that you can run VSTs everywhere, developers are going to even build more VSTs. They're going to want to target VSTs because they have more customers. So yeah, this was an amazing time. Plugins became a whole separate market and business. The plugin developers and the users were completely divorced from the rise and fall of the market shares of the different DAWs. So much so that plugins can just completely outlive the host now. On the right here is that same neon plugin running in GarageBand today. So imagine creating something in 1996 and you're just getting like 30 years of revenue off of it. Pretty cool. So what happened? Like why did we have all these amazing plugin ecosystems? And you don't really see a lot of them today. Well, I think what happened was basically, in short, the web happened. And when we went from a desktop era to the web era, we went from client compute back to server compute. And with that, we couldn't really bring those plugin architectures of shared objects. Multitenancy is kind of a double-edged sword in this way, right? It enabled a lot of great things. But then we also lost a lot of that. And the main reason is you can't just take someone's untrusted data code and run it in your server. And if you're not really sure why that's the case, come talk to me. I can explain a little more why. But it's a very bad idea. So over the next 10 years, basically any SAS application, any web application that wanted to be extensible, did so in this kind of way of having a sort of lockdown DSLs. You can't really take plugins in. You can't really take them out. Not really calling out Salesforce here. This is kind of just the way it had to be. But we weren't able to have that same freedom that we had before. So obviously, the future, I think, is that a web assembly solves that problem where you can have multitenancy and shared objects. And that's going to enable a bunch of new SAS plugin systems. I think probably the best example that I've seen today is going to be something like Shopify Functions. You should definitely check that out. So that's kind of my first prediction. We will start to see more of these SAS plugin systems. I think if that's successful, what you're going to see next is basically consolidation of standards. So where do these companies want to or not? I think that certain verticals will have to consolidate around certain standards because we're going to have that same sort of turing, complete crossing point where once people can emulate each other's plugin systems away, the best plugins are going to win. So an example here would be, like, say, the payments industry all have a kind of similar platform. They all get together and decide, this is what our standard is for operating all these platforms. And they kind of collaborate on this. Yeah, so if you're interested in this, come talk to me. I'm a pretty friendly person. You could also go online and find our community. Ecstasy is an open source community that's building tools to enable this future. And the easiest way to do that would be to check out the GitHub repo and join our Discord. But that's it. Thank you.