3: Web Assembly

Runtime Arguments

Web browsers and web sites have been around for quite a while. Javascript has been the language driving those pages but there's a way to write in a lower-level language and speed up the slow parts without losing cross-platform compatibility. That way is called Web Assembly (WASM). In this episode we dig into exactly what that is.

Show notes:

Take-aways from the episode:

1. If you have a compute intensive part of your web application, it may make sense to implement that bit of code in a compiled language like C, C++ or Rust and then compile them to WASM so they can be executed in the browser.
2. Security and Portability. WASM code is secure as it utilizes the browsers' sandbox and portable as all browsers are supporting the W3C Standard WASM.
3. You are almost certainly using WASM based applications. It's in use in Google Maps & Docs, Netflix, Spotify, Amazon and many more.

Links:

• https://emscripten.org/index.html
• https://emscripten.org/docs/getting_started/Tutorial.html - Nice tutorial
• https://github.com/WebAssembly/wabt - Web Assembly Binary Toolkit
• https://collabnix.com/top-20-companies-that-uses-wasm/ - Companies using WASM
• https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/WebAssembly/Reference - WASM Instruction set
• https://developer.fermyon.com/wasm-languages/webassembly-language-support - Languages supported
• https://github.com/snaplet/postgres-wasm - Postgres implemented in WASM

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