VM Matters: A Comparison of WASM VMs and EVMs in the Performance of Blockchain Smart Contracts

ARXIV.ORG

WebAssembly a fast become the runtime of choice for blockchain implementations, with Ethereum (the biggest blockchain network second only to Bitcoin) looking to adopt this technology in their v2 architecture. The current version of Ethereum has its own virtual machine that runs a language called Solidity and it is expected that the new eWASM virtual machine will be faster. But will it?

This paper puts eWASM to the test, and the results are a little disappointing. Digging into the details it appears that the virtual machine itself is fast, but there are significant overheads. Presumably this is much like the overheads involved in integration JavaScript and WebAssembly, and these will diminish over time.

Blazor WebAssembly Series

CODE-MAZE.COM

Blazor is proving to be a big success, with the StackOverflow blog asking “What’s behind the hype?”. If you’re looking for information on how to get started with Blazor, this looks like a fantastic resource.

as-big

GITHUB.COM

AssemblyScript is a new language, that is closely related to TypeScript, designed for WebAssembly. As AssemblyScript grows in popularity, the community is creating an ecosystem of libraries around it. This one, a library for arbitrary-precision decimal arithmetic, looks particularly useful.

Serverless Genomics

MEDIUM.COM

A lot of bioinformatics tools are written in C/C++/Rust, and it is increasingly common for web apps to perform more of the analysis in the browser. However, in many applications bioinformatics applications require large datasets, which tend to be in the cloud. This blog post looks at how to run one such algorithm using Cloudflare (WebAssembly) Workers.

WebAssembly Summit

WEBASSEMBLY-SUMMIT.COM

WebAssembly Summit is coming! Pencil the 22nd of April into your diary because the schedule looks great.

And Finally

One redditor asked - Will WebAssembly replace JavaScript?, TL;DR; No.