EPFL Logo
fr|en
Login
Concept

WebAssembly

WebAssembly - Wikipedia
WebAssembly - Wikipedia

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
About this result
This page is automatically generated and may contain information that is not correct, complete, up-to-date, or relevant to your search query. The same applies to every other page on this website. Please make sure to verify the information with EPFL's official sources.
Related courses (2)
CS-320: Computer language processing
We teach the fundamental aspects of analyzing and interpreting computer languages, including the techniques to build compilers. You will build a working compiler from an elegant functional language in
CS-420: Advanced compiler construction
Students learn several implementation techniques for modern functional and object-oriented programming languages. They put some of them into practice by developing key parts of a compiler and run time
Related lectures (27)
Code Generation Lab
Covers generating code for a compiler, translating an Amy program to WebAssembly, including memory management and pattern matching compilation.
Bitcoin and Ethereum: Scripting and Gas
Explores Bitcoin scripting, Ethereum gas, smart contracts, limitations, and common uses.
Memory Management: Part I
Covers memory management concepts such as block headers, external fragmentation, reference counting, and mark & sweep garbage collection.
Show more
Related publications (19)

Just-in-time performance without warm-up

Denys Shabalin

Scala has been developed as a language that deeply integrates with the Java ecosystem. It offers seamless interoperability with existing Java libraries. Since the Scala compiler targets Java bytecode, Scala programs have access to high-performance runtimes ...
EPFL2020

Building blocks for commodity augmented reality-based molecular visualization and modeling in web browsers

Luciano Andres Abriata

For years, immersive interfaces using virtual and augmented reality (AR) for molecular visualization and modeling have promised a revolution in the way how we teach, learn, communicate and work in chemistry, structural biology and related areas. However, m ...
2020

Milkomeda: Safeguarding the Mobile GPU Interface Using WebGL Security Checks

Mathias Josef Payer

GPU-accelerated graphics is commonly used in mobile applications. Unfortunately, the graphics interface exposes a large amount of potentially vulnerable kernel code (i.e., the GPU device driver) to untrusted applications. This broad attack surface has resu ...
ASSOC COMPUTING MACHINERY2018
Show more
Related people (2)
Related concepts (17)
Google Native Client
Google Native Client (NaCl) is a discontinued sandboxing technology for running either a subset of Intel x86, ARM, or MIPS native code, or a portable executable, in a sandbox. It allows safely running native code from a web browser, independent of the user operating system, allowing web apps to run at near-native speeds, which aligns with Google's plans for ChromeOS. It may also be used for securing browser plugins, and parts of other applications or full applications such as ZeroVM.
Node.js
Node.js is a cross-platform, open-source server environment that can run on Windows, Linux, Unix, macOS, and more. Node.js is a back-end JavaScript runtime environment, runs on the V8 JavaScript engine, and executes JavaScript code outside a web browser. Node.js lets developers use JavaScript to write command line tools and for server-side scripting. The ability to run JavaScript code on the server is often used to generate dynamic web page content before the page is sent to the user's web browser.
Asm.js
asm.js is a subset of JavaScript designed to allow computer software written in languages such as C to be run as web applications while maintaining performance characteristics considerably better than standard JavaScript, which is the typical language used for such applications. asm.js consists of a strict subset of JavaScript, to which code written in statically typed languages with manual memory management (such as C) is translated by a source-to-source compiler such as Emscripten (based on LLVM).
Show more

Copyright © 2025 EPFL, all rights reserved

Graph Chatbot

Chat with Graph Search

Ask any question about EPFL courses, lectures, exercises, research, news, etc. or try the example questions below.

DISCLAIMER: The Graph Chatbot is not programmed to provide explicit or categorical answers to your questions. Rather, it transforms your questions into API requests that are distributed across the various IT services officially administered by EPFL. Its purpose is solely to collect and recommend relevant references to content that you can explore to help you answer your questions.