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:
- 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.
- Security and Portability. WASM code is secure as it utilizes the browsers' sandbox and portable as all browsers are supporting the W3C Standard WASM.
- 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 jam@RuntimeArguments.fm
Wolf can be reached at wolf@RuntimeArguments.fm
Follow us on Mastodon: @RuntimeArguments@hachyderm.io
If you have feedback for us, please send it to feedback@RuntimeArguments.fm
Theme music:
Dawn by nuer self, from the album Digital Sky
Host
Jim McQuillan and Wolf
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