In the last issue I shared the article “webassembly: the new kubernetes?”. It has just popped up on Hacker News again today, generating a lot of discussion and positive views about the future of WebAssembly 🙂
Echoing this sentiment, a recent tweet from Matt Butcher caught my eye …
If VMs were the first wave and containers were the second, #WebAssembly is the third wave of cloud compute.
Porting USB applications to the web. Part 1: libusb
WEB.DEV
WebAssembly allows you to execute applications written in C++, Rust and a whole host of other languages in the browser. However, WebAssembly itself is simply the execution engine. If your app needs to render to the screen, access the file-system or peripherals, you need to work out how to perform this bridging.
In this fantastic blog post Ingvar looks at porting applications that use USB to the web, by porting libusb - a popular USB library written in C - to WebAssembly. The solution makes use of one of the new “Fugu” APIs, WebUSB. Lots to learn from this post.
AssemblyScript vs. Rust: Which Is Right for Your Wasm App?
SUBORBITAL.DEV
Rust and AssemblyScript are the two most popular wasm languages (as demonstrated by the survey I ran last year), however, they are two very different languages. This post take a holistic look at each, giving you the tools you need to make a well-informed decision.
Building a self-contained game in C# under 8 kilobytes
MEDIUM.COM
I do love anything to do with emulators, or old computer tech - so this blog post caught my attention. This is the classic ‘snake’ game implemented in C#, with the added twist that the author wanted to crunch it down in size to fit on a floppy disk. Quite a challenge, as their first iteration, with the full .NET runtime was 65MBytes!
You can find the Wasm4 (the WebAssembly ‘virtual’ console) version of this game on GitHub.
The State of WebAssembly – 2021 and 2022
PLATFORM.UNO
This is a solid roundup of the last year in WebAssembly, focussing on the newly added language (runtime) features, and what to expect in the future.