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: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.htmlhttps://emscripten.org/docs/getting_started/Tutorial.html - Nice tutorialhttps://github.com/WebAssembly/wabt - Web Assembly Binary Toolkithttps://collabnix.com/top-20-companies-that-uses-wasm/ - Companies using WASMhttps://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/WebAssembly/Reference - WASM Instruction sethttps://developer.fermyon.com/wasm-languages/webassembly-language-support - Languages supportedhttps://github.com/snaplet/postgres-wasm - Postgres implemented in WASMHosts:Jim McQuillan can be reached at [email protected] can be reached at [email protected] us on Mastodon: @[email protected] you have feedback for us, please send it to [email protected] music:Dawn by nuer self, from the album Digital Sky