Google, Microsoft and Mozilla to launch ‘WebAssembly’ – A faster Web standard
Google, Microsoft, and Mozilla team up to launch ‘WebAssembly’ – A new binary format for the web.”
Microsoft, Google, Mozilla and the engineers from the WebKit project today announced that they have teamed up to launch ‘WebAssembly’, a new binary format for compiling applications for the web which is faster than ever.
A well known scripting language, JavaScript is a programming language for most of the things on the internet.Web apps and webpages hugely rely on JS (JavaScript). Though JS is not the ideal programming language out there, it has become the standard of the web, but it will soon have a new challenger in the form of ‘WebAssembly’.
JavaScript is the programming language of WebAssembly. Over the years, however, we’ve seen more and more efforts that allow developers to work around some of the limitations of JavaScript by building compilers that transpile code in other languages to JavaScript. Some of these projects focus on adding new features to the language (like Microsoft’s TypeScript) or speeding up JavaScript (like Mozilla’s asm.js project).
WebAssembly
WebAssembly or wasm, new binary format is meant to allow programmers to compile their code for the browser (currently the focus is on C/C++, with other languages to follow), where it is then executed inside the JavaScript engine. Instead of having to parse the full code, though, which can often take quite a while (especially on mobile), WebAssembly can be decoded significantly faster than earlier.
The basic idea behind it is, that WebAssembly will provide developers with a single compilation target for the web that will, eventually, become a web standard that’s implemented in all browsers.
We know that, JavaScript files are simple text files that are downloaded from the server and then parsed and compiled by the JavaScript engine in the browser. The WebAssembly team decided to go with a binary format because that code can be compressed even more than the standard JavaScript text files and because it’s much faster for the engine to decode the binary format (up to 23x faster in the current prototype) than parsing asm.js code.
The ‘asm.js’ code of Mozilla has long aimed to bring near-native speeds to the web. Google’s Native Client project for running native code in the browser had similar aims, but got relatively little traction. It looks like WebAssemly may be able to bring the best of these projects to the browser now.
For initiation, the WebAssembly team aims to offer about the same functionality as asm.js (and developers will be able to use the same Emscripten tool for WebAssembly as they use for compiling asm.js code today).
For now, the team plans to launch a so-called polyfill library that will translate WebAssembly code into JavaScript so that it can run in any browser — even those without native WebAssembly support (that’s obviously a bit absurd, but that last step won’t be needed once browsers can run this code natively). Over time then, the teams will build more tools (compilers, debuggers, etc.) and add support for more languages (Rust, Go and C#, for example).
As JavaScript inventor (and short-term Mozilla CEO) Brendan Eich points out today, once the main browsers support the new format natively, JavaScript and WebAssembly will be able to diverge again.
The team notes that the idea here is not to replace JavaScript, by the way, but to allow many more languages to be compiled for the Web. Indeed, chances are that both JavaScript and WebAssembly will be used side-by-side and some parts of the application may use WebAssembly modules (animation, visualization, compression, etc.), while the user interface will still be mostly written in JavaScript.
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