This is a standalone VM for WebAssembly. It can load both the standard binary format, and the text format defined by the WebAssembly reference interpreter. For the text format, it can load both the standard stack machine syntax and the old-fashioned AST syntax used by the reference interpreter, and all of the testing commands.
Emscripten is a compiler toolchain for asm.js and WebAssembly which lets you run C and C++ on the web at near-native speed.
Emscripten output sizes have decreased a lot recently, especially for smaller programs
Read the full article: https://hacks.mozilla.org/2018/01/shrinking-webassembly-and-javascript-code-sizes-in-emscripten/
he WebAssembly API provides a special function to support streaming compilation in combination with the fetch() API:
const module = await WebAssembly.compileStreaming(fetch('foo.wasm'));
This API has been available since V8 v6.1 and Chrome 61, although the initial implementation didn’t actually use streaming compilation. However, with V8 v6.5 and Chrome 65 we take advantage of this API and compile WebAssembly modules already while we are still downloading the module bytes. As soon as we download all bytes of a single function, we pass the function to a background thread to compile it.
Read the full article: https://hacks.mozilla.org/2018/01/shrinking-webassembly-and-javascript-code-sizes-in-emscripten/
The Spectre security vulnerability has left many companies scrambing to mitigate it. Along with other browser vendors, Apple worked quickly to add some mitigations to Safari and issued iOS 11.2.2 to patch it.
Unfortunately they also completely broke WebAssembly on iOS. As in, WebAssembly no longer works, period. According to this, the issue is memory reads from non-zero locations return zero. This amounts to "memory reads don't work". Obviously if a program can't read memory, the program is unlikely to work. So it's pretty broken. Strangely this only affects iOS and not Safari on macOS.
Apple rushed out a follow-up patch with iOS 11.2.5. I expected them to have fixed this rather glaring error in this patch. Unfortunately no, it's still broken. When will it be fixed? I don't know; Apple don't discuss their plans publicly. The best guess I've had is in this WebKit bug of "spring". That could mean WebAssembly is enabled but non-functioning in a major browser for a month or more.
Read the full article: https://www.scirra.com/blog/218/apple-broke-webassembly-and-are-leaving-it-broken
WebAssembly is a new low-level binary compile format that will do a better job at being a compiler target than JavaScript. It’s being called “the future of the web platform” and did you know that its promising features in terms of speed, reusability and safety has brought major browser vendors working together to make it a reality and the MVP is already available in major browsers.
Want to know how WebAssembly work? Why is WebAssembly so fast? How to build web apps using C/C++/Rust? In this talk we’ll look at history, basics, applications and deep dive into the core concepts of WebAssembly with help of live demos and coding.
Slide: https://speakerdeck.com/dvigneshwer/hackers-guide-to-webassembly
YouTube:
Youtube Video
We're going to use Rust, Cargo Web and Stdweb to provide WebAssembly Modules, then use them in react-static.
Today Wasm runs just 20% slower than native code execution. This is, by all means, an astonishing result. It’s a format that’s compiled into a sandbox environment and runs within a whole lot of constraints to make sure it has no security vulnerabilities or is very hardened against them. The slowdown is minimal compared to truly native code. What’s more, it will be even faster in the future.
Read the full article: https://blog.sessionstack.com/how-javascript-works-a-comparison-with-webassembly-why-in-certain-cases-its-better-to-use-it-d80945172d79
People call WebAssembly a game changer because it makes it possible to run code on the web faster. Some of these speedups are already present, and some are yet to come.
One of these speedups is streaming compilation, where the browser compiles the code while the code is still being downloaded. Up until now, this was just a potential future speedup. But with the release of Firefox 58 next week, it becomes a reality.
Firefox 58 also includes a new 2-tiered compiler. The new baseline compiler compiles code 10–15 times faster than the optimizing compiler.
Combined, these two changes mean we compile code faster than it comes in from the network.
Read the full article: https://hacks.mozilla.org/2018/01/making-webassembly-even-faster-firefoxs-new-streaming-and-tiering-compiler/
Last week, I had successfully built JavaScript and WebAssembly ZXing barcode SDK. In this post, I will use the pure JavaScript barcode SDK to create a simple client-side HTML5 barcode reader app, which works in any WebRTC supported web browsers.
Read the full article: https://medium.com/@yushulx/building-html5-barcode-reader-with-pure-javascript-sdk-842391372818
WebAssembly modules can be loaded in either the UI thread or in a Web Worker. You would then take the compiled module and pass that to another thread, or even another window, by using the postMessage method.
Read the full article: https://medium.com/@c.gerard.gallant/webassembly-web-workers-f2ba637c3e4a