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Kinda, yes. A runtime means something specific for the wasm standard [0] (providing the wasm VM, the store, other WebAssembly objects, provisioning for imports exports of a module and executing them etc).

Lunatic provides this basic (but not trivial; it's complex) functionality through wasmtime. What lunatic offers is lots of functionality on top for wasm modules to actually do stuff. In general wasm modules by themselves, if not in the browser with access to the web APIs, are pretty useless since they are run in a sandbox and have no access to the outside world except for the imported functions you provide.

To be useful outside the browser, they need to do {network,filesystem} IO, which is the goal of the WASI standard [1]: to provide interfaces to external functionality. Lunatic says on the README it gives interfaces for message passing, filesystem, memory, network connections IO, etc.

WASM standards have actually stopped progressing since the Bytecode alliance took over the entire standard. It's very difficult to find who personally actually makes decisions in Bytecode alliance: going through lots of links and documents and github repos I see mostly employees of Fermyon and Fastly. It's important to notice the Bytecode alliance acts as if wasmtime is the only runtime that exists which is not the reality.

As a complete outsider and observer with no stake in the game, it seems like WASM is dead as a technology on the server unless initiatives like Lunatic take it forward with actual implementations instead of really basic product offerings without much functionality, or worse, vague promises, attempts at trademark registrations, registration of all wasm-related terms domains in most big TLDs. There's lots of incompetance, inexperience and/or malice in the WASM world and it's a shame.

At least before it all went to shit, WASM got full support on all browsers and we can enjoy it there!

[0] https://www.w3.org/TR/wasm-core-2/exec/runtime.html [1] https://wasi.dev/