Web Assembly or wasm is an experimental efficient low-level programming language for in-browser client-side scripting, which is currently in development. Its initial aim is to support compilation from C/C++, though other source languages are also intended to be supported.
Features of Web Assembly
Web Assembly is an improvement to JavaScript: Implement your performance critical stuff in wasm and import it like a standard JavaScript module.
A new language: Web Assembly code defines an AST (Abstract Syntax Tree) represented in a binary format. You can author and debug in a text format so it’s readable.
A browser improvement: Browsers will understand the binary format, which means we’ll be able to compile binary bundles that compress smaller than the text JavaScript we use today. Smaller payloads will make faster delivery. Depending on compile-time optimization opportunities, Web Assembly bundles may run faster than JavaScript, too!
A compile target – A way for others languages to get first-class binary support across the entire web platform stack.
Why do we need this Web Assembly thing?
We need Web Assembly because it as flexible as JavaScript is, it’s still too hard to express many of the things we may want to in JavaScript, and the features we’d need to make it easy might add complexity to a language that already confuses many users.
What will Web Assembly be used for ?
Among other things, it will be easy to express things like threads and SIMD — a fancy word that means you can line up multiple chunks of data next to each other and invoke a single instruction to operate on all of them at the same time. It stands for Single Instruction, Multiple Data.
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