"The most amazing achievement of the computer software industry is its continuing cancellation of the steady and staggering gains made by the computer hardware industry." - Henry Petroski
It's a quote spread around all the time by people fascinated by the idea that even hardware is unimaginably faster than it was back the day, the relative speed of software "feels" to be about the same. Many contribute this ability of software to things like JavaScript and other scripting languages saying there's too much overhead. I think it's also that we actually do do more but I digress.
What WebAssembly promises is to let us (the web) do even more with even less. While I think the barrier to entry is still a little high, WASM brings smaller code deliverables, faster code, and less overhead. I am excited to see what we'll make with it.
edit: something else that I forgot to mention, is that since WASM is a compiler target and not a language itself, it serves as a medium for any language to come to the web provided a compatible compiler is made. I think that is really cool.
WASM provides the ability to compile existing libraries to WASM and push code previously thought too heavy for the browser. Big existing engines like Unity are being made "natively" available for web development, and with type="module" coming to Workers soon bigger and bigger apps will be feasible. On the other end, this provides a way to make smaller web apps even more performant and use less bandwith.
It's still very young and barely past its MVP. The MVP was to just get a basic workable implementation in the big browsers. For more info checkout their Roadmap and planned future features.
It's a quote spread around all the time by people fascinated by the idea that even hardware is unimaginably faster than it was back the day, the relative speed of software "feels" to be about the same. Many contribute this ability of software to things like JavaScript and other scripting languages saying there's too much overhead. I think it's also that we actually do do more but I digress.
What WebAssembly promises is to let us (the web) do even more with even less. While I think the barrier to entry is still a little high, WASM brings smaller code deliverables, faster code, and less overhead. I am excited to see what we'll make with it.
edit: something else that I forgot to mention, is that since WASM is a compiler target and not a language itself, it serves as a medium for any language to come to the web provided a compatible compiler is made. I think that is really cool.
Can you give an example of something most interesting that could come out of this?
WASM provides the ability to compile existing libraries to WASM and push code previously thought too heavy for the browser. Big existing engines like Unity are being made "natively" available for web development, and with
type="module"coming toWorkers soon bigger and bigger apps will be feasible. On the other end, this provides a way to make smaller web apps even more performant and use less bandwith.Not entirely true, for native libraries sure, but other than that it's not really smaller and very limited in what it can do
It's still very young and barely past its MVP. The MVP was to just get a basic workable implementation in the big browsers. For more info checkout their Roadmap and planned future features.
Compatible compilers will help us bring C++ to the web!! 😋