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Concept
WebAssembly
Summary
WebAssembly (sometimes abbreviated Wasm) defines a portable binary-code format and a corresponding text format for executable programs as well as software interfaces for facilitating interactions between such programs and their host environment.
The main goal of WebAssembly is to enable high-performance applications on web pages, "but it does not make any Web-specific assumptions or provide Web-specific features, so it can be employed in other environments as well." It is an open standard and aims to support any language on any operating system, and in practice all of the most popular languages already have at least some level of support.
Announced in and first released in , WebAssembly became a World Wide Web Consortium recommendation on 5 December 2019 and it received the Programming Languages Software Award from ACM SIGPLAN in 2021. The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) maintains the standard with contributions from Mozilla, Microsoft, Google, Apple, Fastly, Intel, and Red Hat.
WebAssembly is named to evoke the concept of assembly language, a term which dates to the 1950s. The name suggests bringing assembly-like programming to the Web, where it will be executed client-side by the website-user's computer via the user's web browser. To accomplish this, WebAssembly must be much more hardware-independent than a true assembly language.
WebAssembly was first announced in 2015, and the first demonstration was executing Unity's Angry Bots in Firefox, Google Chrome, and Microsoft Edge. The precursor technologies were asm.js from Mozilla and Google Native Client, and the initial implementation was based on the feature set of asm.js. The asm.js technology already provides near-native code execution speeds and can be considered a viable alternative for browsers that don't support WebAssembly or have it disabled for security reasons.
In March 2017, the design of the minimum viable product (MVP) was declared to be finished and the preview phase ended. In late September 2017, Safari 11 was released with support.
Official source
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