Last week, Ars Technica indicated that the engineers at Google, Microsoft, Mozilla, and Apple have joined hands to create WebAssembly. WebAssembly is a bytecode for the future browsers which will be over 20 times faster in performance. After multiple efforts in the past to speed up web applications, this particular striked the right chord.The question arises here is, how is this different from previous attempts? This project has something, which no other previous attempt has had, and that is the support of all browser vendors. At present, WebAssembly is just a discussion group on GitHub where future possibilities are being explored, but the W3C has already developed a special page for the project.
WebAssembly is a project to create a new bytecode intended to be more efficient for both desktop and mobile browsers. Broken down, it’s a machine-readable instruction set that’s faster for browsers to load than high-level languages. Currently, browsers use JavaScript to interpret code and enable functionality on websites (like dynamic content and forms for example). WebAssembly however, could bring app-like performance to web content and apps.According to the WebAssembly design guidelines, the new file format will allow developers to compile their “code” to a binary, which will be executed inside each browser’s (Chrome, IE/Edge, Firefox, Safari) JavaScript engine. As of right now, only C and C++ code can be compiled into WebAssembly and be converted into plain JavaScript.
“While WebAssembly will, over time, allow many languages to be compiled to the Web, JS has an incredible amount of momentum and will remain the single, privileged dynamic language of the Web,” reads the official WebAssembly statement.