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An Overview of WebAssembly
Creation, Development, and Future
What if you could run any software application at peak performance on nothing but a webpage? Thanks to the speed & efficiency of WebAssembly, a newly developed compilation target for the web, locally-hosted software applications may soon be a thing of the past. WebAssembly was introduced five years ago in a historic contribution between the four major browsers: Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Apple’s Safari, and Microsoft’s Edge. Two years later it was compatible with 91% of web browsers, and by 2019 it became the fourth World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) standard along HTML, CSS, and JavaScript [1]. Webassembly, or wasm, has produced significant hype within the web development industry. But for those outside, some basic questions remain unanswered: what is WebAssembly and why is it suddenly so important? This blog post will answer these questions from the ground up.
- Why is WebAssembly important?
- What is WebAssembly?
- Adoption and development in the industry
- The future of WebAssembly
Why is WebAssembly important?
To understand the need for WebAssembly, we must first understand two things: (1) why Javascript (JS) is the standard compilation target for web browsers, and (2) why it is not fit for that role. Back in the day, webpages were just a bunch of static documents and simple forms. Then Javascript was introduced, a high-level scripting language which allowed for dynamic behavior on web pages. Anytime something is dynamic on a webpage (a pop-up notification, a share button, a live news feed, etc.), Javascript is responsible for that feature. Netscape and Sun Microsystems developed JS in 1993 for small scripts that would add single feature interaction on a web page. They did not foresee the rapid expansion of their language to new and more complex use cases: Eric Lippert, one of the initial contributors to JS, said “The notion that there would someday be [JS] frameworks with hundreds of thousands of lines was not even close to being on our radar.” [2].
As browsers were vying for market share in the browser wars of 2004 [3], the main focus was around client side scripting. Browser creators needed to optimize their script parsers, which in turn meant…
