2-5: Lin Clark on WebAssembly

The goals of WebAssembly is to make it possible to have consistent performance in your applications. WebAssembly gives you a language that gives you the behavior of JavaScript and more features in order to achieve a better performance than JavaScript because this programming language was designed to be easy to use not to have an excellent performance.

For example, the PC games in webpages (most of them) were develop with JavaScript; first, we need to remember that JavaScript it is not a language that was created to develop games, it was created to be easy so, naturally, it was. normal that this kind of web games have frame drops because of the language per se.

At this point, the question that arises is "What is WebAssembly". WebAssembly (abbreviated Wasm), is a binary instruction format for a stack-based virtual machine. Wasm is designed as a portable target for compilation of high-level languages like C, C++, Rust, enabling deployment on the web for client and server applications. WebAssembly became a World Wide Web Consortium recommendation on 5 December 2019 and, alongside HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, is the fourth language to run natively in browsers.

Contextualizing a little bit, WebAssembly started by executing the Unity's game Angry Bots in the browser Mozilla Firefox. In the very beginning the high-level languages C, C++, Rust were the ones that WebAssembly compile. Today, WebAssembly compiler also supports .NET, C#, F#, Python, JavaScript, Java, Julia, Ruby and finally but not least Go programming language.

We need to have in mind that independently that WebAssembly goal is to have a consistent performance in your web applications, the format of WebAssembly also was designed to be executed and integrated in other environments as well.

In my opinion I think that WebAssembly is a solution to the performance problems that languages like JavaScript has. But stop a few seconds and think... Are video games the final target to WebAssembly? My answer will be no, because if WebAssembly goal is to have a consistent performance you could build a web applications of data mining or data processing that could be done in a web browser rather than running a stand-alone application in order to achieve that goal of performance.

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