WebAssembly
Created by Vindhya Raviraj
What is WebAssembly (Wasm)?
- Standard to bring native code to web browsers
- Supported in all major browsers
- Compilation target for native programming languages such as, C, C++, Go, Rust
Compilation target? Huh?
- JS is interpreted and compiled in the browser
- Wasm is partially compiled ahead of time
Source:
Lin Clark, Mozilla
Source:
Lin Clark, Mozilla
Benefits
- Fast, more consistently performant
- Smaller downloads
- All the benefits of web apps: linkable, secure, composable
Examples
- AutoCAD now works on the web
- Windows 2000 emulation
- Adobe Lightroom web app: A core image-editing library written in asm.js (pre-cursor to WebAssembly)
- eBay Barcode Scanner for web (article)
Future
Library authors, like the React team, can rewrite modules in the library using Wasm