Webassembly description ¶
Andreas Rossberg definition ¶
WebAssembly is a safe and portable format for efficient native-code execution, available in browsers and other embeddings.
I am the author of the language specification and maintainer of the reference interpreter, as well as owner of various feature proposals in the works.
- Homepage :
- Specification :
- Reference Interpreter :
https://webassembly.org/docs/use-cases/ ¶
Use Cases ¶
WebAssembly’s high-level goals define what WebAssembly aims to achieve, and in which order.
How WebAssembly achieves its goals is documented for Web and non-Web platforms.
The following is an unordered and incomplete list of applications/domains/computations that would benefit from WebAssembly and are being considered as use cases during the design of WebAssembly.
Inside the browser ¶
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Better execution for languages and toolkits that are currently cross-compiled to the Web (C/C++, GWT, …).
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Image / video editing.
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Games:
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Casual games that need to start quickly.
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AAA games that have heavy assets.
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Game portals (mixed-party/origin content).
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Peer-to-peer applications (games, collaborative editing, decentralized and centralized).
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Music applications (streaming, caching).
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Image recognition.
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Live video augmentation (e.g. putting hats on people’s heads).
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VR and augmented reality (very low latency).
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CAD applications.
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Scientific visualization and simulation.
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Interactive educational software, and news articles.
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Platform simulation / emulation (ARC, DOSBox, QEMU, MAME, …).
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Language interpreters and virtual machines.
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POSIX user-space environment, allowing porting of existing POSIX applications.
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Developer tooling (editors, compilers, debuggers, …).
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Remote desktop.
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VPN.
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Encryption.
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Local web server.
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Common NPAPI users, within the web’s security model and APIs.
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Fat client for enterprise applications (e.g. databases).
Outside the browser ¶
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Game distribution service (portable and secure).
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Server-side compute of untrusted code.
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Server-side application.
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Hybrid native apps on mobile devices.
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Symmetric computations across multiple nodes
How WebAssembly can be used ¶
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Entire code base in WebAssembly.
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Main frame in WebAssembly, but the UI is in JavaScript / HTML.
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Re-use existing code by targeting WebAssembly, embedded in a larger JavaScript / HTML application.
This could be anything from simple helper libraries, to compute-oriented task offload.
Wikipedia definition ¶
WebAssembly (often shortened to Wasm) is a standard that defines a binary format and a corresponding assembly-like text format for executables used by web pages.
The purpose of Wasm is to enable the JavaScript engine of a web browser to execute page scripts nearly as fast as native machine code.
But this is not a full replacement for JavaScript; rather, Wasm is only intended for performance-critical portions of page scripts.
Wasm code runs in the same sandbox as regular script code, but only regular scripts have direct access to the DOM tree.
The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) maintains the standard with contributions from Mozilla, Microsoft, Google, and Apple.
WebAssembly definition ¶
See also
WebAssembly (abbreviated Wasm) is a binary instruction format for a stack-based virtual machine.
Wasm is designed as a portable target for compilation of high-level languages like C/C++/Rust, enabling deployment on the web for client and server applications.
Efficient and fast ¶
The Wasm stack machine is designed to be encoded in a size- and load-time-efficient binary format.
WebAssembly aims to execute at native speed by taking advantage of common hardware capabilities available on a wide range of platforms.
Mozilla definition ¶
Definition 1 ¶
WebAssembly is a new type of code that can be run in modern web browsers it is a low-level assembly-like language with a compact binary format that runs with near-native performance and provides languages such as C/C++ and Rust with a compilation target so that they can run on the web.
It is also designed to run alongside JavaScript , allowing both to work together.
In a Nutshell (2020-05-23) ¶
WebAssembly has huge implications for the web platform — it provides a way to run code written in multiple languages on the web at near native speed, with client apps running on the web that previously couldn’t have done so.
WebAssembly is designed to complement and run alongside JavaScript using the WebAssembly JavaScript APIs , you can load WebAssembly modules into a JavaScript app and share functionality between the two.
This allows you to take advantage of WebAssembly’s performance and power and JavaScript’s expressiveness and flexibility in the same apps, even if you don’t know how to write WebAssembly code.
And what’s even better is that it is being developed as a web standard via the W3C WebAssembly Working Group and Community Group with active participation from all major browser vendors.