Adobe brings a simplified Photoshop to the web
THEVERGE.COM
A couple of years ago it was spotted that Adobe were hiring WebAssembly engineers, clearly plans were afoot. This week we saw exactly what those engineers have been working on! Whilst I have linked to the article on The Verge, I’d recommend that you read this bog post on web.dev instead, it has much more technical detail.
In brief, Adobe have had a goal of bringing their productivity tools to the web, much like GMail and Google Docs, allowing people to become productive immediately without the need for installing software. However, JavaScript just doesn’t provide the performance needed for Adobe’s flagship graphics package, Photoshop. This blog post describes hwo WebAssembly, plus a number of the more recent innovations including SIMD, Multithreading and various new browser capabilities thanks to the Fugu project have made Adobe’s long-term goal a reality.
AKS support for WebAssembly System Interface (WASI) workloads
MICROSOFT.COM
This announcement is the culmination of a few important and exciting WebAssembly initiative. First is the WebAssembly System Interface (WASI), that defines a modular suite of APIs for non-browser based WebAssembly applications. These APIs allow WebAssembly modules to access the filesystem, timers, and many other system resources. The second is Krustlet, an open-source project that allows WASM modules to be run on Kubernetes.
Seeing the two come together, allowing first-class support for running WebAssembly on Azure, is great news!
Lin Clark on the WebAssembly Component Model
INFOQ.COM
WASI is just one component part of a greater ambition, being driven forwards by the Bytecode Alliance. In this podcast Lin Clark (one of the co-founders), talks about some of the more ambitious long-term goals for WebAssembly.
BADGB, a gameboy emulator in 3072 bytes of hand-written WebAssembly
TWITTER.COM
There are Wasm hacks, and wasm hacks - Ben Smith, who has a long history of hand-crafting WebAssembly, has created a Nintendo GameBoy emulator, by hand, in just 3072 bytes of WebAssembly. Mike Drop.