3: Web Assembly

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 Jim explains exactly what that is, and Wolf asks questions.

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

Hosts:
Jim McQuillan can be reached at [email protected]
Wolf can be reached at [email protected]

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Theme music:

Dawn by nuer self, from the album Digital Sky