2016-02-24

WebAssembly, a the bytecode for the web to free the web from the JavaScript tyranny

But the people calling for a bytecode for the browser never went away, and they were never entirely wrong about the perceived advantages. And now they're going to get their wish. WebAssembly is a new project being worked on by people from Mozilla, Microsoft, Google, and Apple, to produce a bytecode for the Web.

WebAssembly, or wasm for short, is intended to be a portable bytecode that will be efficient for browsers to download and load, providing a more efficient target for compilers than plain JavaScript or even asm.js. Like, for example, .NET bytecode, wasm instructions operate on native machine types such as 32-bit integers, enabling efficient compilation. It's also designed to be extensible, to make it easy to add, say, support for SIMD instruction sets like SSE and AVX.

WebAssembly will include both a binary notation, that compilers will produce, and a corresponding text notation, suitable for display in debuggers or development environments. Early prototypes are already showing some of the expected advantages; the binary representation is 20 times faster to parse than the equivalent asm.js.

No comments:

Post a Comment