Will WebAssembly Replace JavaScript? (medium.com)

On Tuesday Firefox 52 became the first browser to support WebAssembly, a new standard "to enable near-native performance for web applications" without a plug-in by pre-compiling code into low-level, machine-ready instructions. Mozilla engineer Lin Clark sees this as an inflection point where the speed of browser-based applications increases dramatically. An anonymous reader quotes David Bryant, the head of platform engineering at Mozilla. This new standard will enable amazing video games and high-performance web apps for things like computer-aided design, video and image editing, and scientific visualization... Over time, many existing productivity apps (e.g. email, social networks, word processing) and JavaScript frameworks will likely use WebAssembly to significantly reduce load times while simultaneously improving performance while running... developers can integrate WebAssembly libraries for CPU-intensive calculations (e.g. compression, face detection, physics) into existing web apps that use JavaScript for less intensive work... In some ways, WebAssembly changes what it means to be a web developer, as well as the fundamental abilities of the web.
Mozilla celebrated with a demo video of the high-resolution graphics of Zen Garden, and while right now WebAssembly supports compilation from C and C++ (plus some preliminary support for Rust), "We expect that, as WebAssembly continues to evolve, you'll also be able to use it with programming languages often used for mobile apps, like Java, Swift, and C#."

Comments

First Webassembly malware post!

[slazzy]

Yeah!

Re:The cloud

[Anonymous Coward]

It's cute that you're your small town IT guy, but real businesses where people deal every hour with more money than you make a year require professional software, and that's where the quality of advanced offerings from Microsoft shine.

Re:The cloud

[Anonymous Coward]

You had me up until "Microsoft."

Re:Native code running in the Browser?

[NoNonAlphaCharsHere]

Yaaaaayyyyyyyyy!!!!!!
I, for one, cannot wait to load webpages with near-native busy-wait code written by some amateur to do really really useful shit, like check every 7 seconds if there's been an update to their homepage (a la Huffington Post).