Google, Microsoft and Mozilla Launch WebAssembly, New Binary Format For the Web
Google, Mozilla and Microsoft along with Webkit Project engineers have combined their talents to launch WebAssembly. This binary format will be used to compile applications for the web.
Currently, the web flourishes on maintaining standards and with JavaScript as its programming language. Given its limitations, more and more developers are now using other languages to transpile code to JavaScript.
A number of these projects focus on the addition of new features such as Microsoft’s TypeScript and Mozilla’s asm.js projects. Now a number of these are coming together as WebAssembly. Also, this new format will allow programmers to compile code for the browser and where it will be executed in the JavaScript engine.
One significant advantage of this is that the code, which takes too long to parse the normal way, will be decoded faster with this new format.
This project is a way of ensuring that all web developers will approach WebAssembly as a single compilation target and which will become a new standard implemented in all web browsers.
While JavaScript files are text files that compiled by the JavaScript Engine in the browser, the WebAssembly team has gone with a binary format as it is more compressible and can be decoded much faster than the way it is done currently.
At this point, the team will launch a polyfill library that can translate any language from WebAssembly code to JavaScript so that it can run in any browser. More tools and support for other languages will be added in future stages.
That said, and as Brendan Eich, JavaScript’s inventor, puts it, as the main browsers support this new format natively, then WebAssembly and JavaScript will be able to seperate and go their own way.
No matter what, the plan is not to replace JavaScript but to allow for many more languages to be compiled over the internet.
