Introduction to WebAssembly - why should we care?

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Gabriele Tomassetti article about WebAssembly, or wasm, which is a low-level bytecode format for in-browser client-side scripting. In practical terms, WebAssembly is implemented by browsers’ developers on the back of the existing JavaScript engine.

The kind of binary format being considered for WebAssembly can be natively decoded much faster than JavaScript can be parsed (experiments show more than 20× faster).

In the greater scheme of things, the arrival of WebAssembly means that you will not be forced anymore to use JavaScript for the web, because it is the only thing that run in the browser.

A founding principle of WebAssembly is to integrate well with the existing JavaScript world.

Author further covers:

  • How WebAssembly works
  • WebAssembly tools
  • Using WebAssembly
  • Interoperability between C and JavaScript

Its development is backed by people at Mozilla, Microsoft, Google and Apple. Example code and links to further resources also provided. Good read!

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Tags programming javascript nodejs