Major Browsers Add Experimental Support For WebAssembly (thestack.com)

An anonymous reader writes: Four major web browsers have announced support for the near-native compiling technology WebAssembly, and collaborated to bring an initial common game demo of Angry Bots, running via Unity and WebAssembly, to experimental builds of Chrome, Firefox, Microsoft Edge and, shortly, Safari. WebAssembly was launched last year in a joint project between Microsoft, Mozilla, Apple and Google as a potentially more efficient route to assembly-level performance than asm.js, which is in itself a low-level subset of JavaScript.

Comments

Re:What is webassembly? Never heard of it before..

[firewrought]

It's a replacement of two previous ideas... Mozilla's asm.js ("let's specify a subset of JavaScript that can run faster") and Google's NaCL ("let's ship x86 code directly to the browser"). As best I can tell, the replacement resembles putting a Java/.NET-style virtual machine into the browser to execute a new form of bytecode (.wasm files).

This is good for speed, which is in turn good for developers who want to deliver complex ("Photoshop-like") apps from the cloud.

It's bad for security (expanded attack surface), and it's bad for privacy (more ways to fingerprint the browser).

It's a wash for transparency: today's minified JavaScript is pretty much unreadable anyways.

Probably my biggest concern off the bat is wondering how the ecosystem for web API's is going to work when everyone's developing in their own favorite programming language. Traditionally, JavaScript has been a uniting force in this regard.