WebAssembly 2.0 First Working Draft

W3.ORG

The first WebAssembly draft specification was published by W3C, the same organisation that manages the HTML, and CSS specifications among others. The first iteration of WebAssembly was always intended to be an MVP (minimum viable product), providing the capabilities required to move some challenging workloads into the browser, for example Google Earth and the Unreal game engine.

Since then, numerous new features have been added to the specification, culminating in the recently published v2.0 working draft. For a quick summary of what’s been added, take a look at this comment on Hacker News.

How WebAssembly Gets Used: The 18 Most Exciting Startups Building with Wasm

MEDIUM.COM

The WebAssembly runtime is being used by a growing number of companies, both well established (Google, BBC, Adobe) and start-ups. This blog post provides a great summary of a number of start-ups where WebAssembly is central to their business model.

where wasm

There are lots of great quotes from the CEOs and CTOs of these companies, explaining exactly why they have opted for WebAssembly.

Building a WebAssembly-powered serverless platform

SCOTTLOGIC.COM

Considering that WebAssembly is becoming such a popular runtime, I wanted to have a go at creating a simple serverless platform myself!

In this blog post I explore the Wasmtime WebAssembly runtime, and build a WebAssembly-powered serverless platform in just 70 lines of code. It really is quite easy to incorporate WebAssembly into your product.

JavaScript Garbage Collection with WebAssembly is Possible Today

JOTT.LIVE

Making reference to the W3C v2.0 specification above, one of the features that hasn’t been added to WebAssembly yet is garbage collection. This blog post demonstrates how, with a bit of JavaScript glue code, you can use Weak References from the JavaScript runtime to achieve similar results.

Infinite Mac: An Instant-Booting Quadra in Your Browser

PERSISTENT.INFO

And finally, something fun to play with - a fully functional 68k Mac, in your browser. Well, almost fully-functional, it crashed when I tried to play the classic Battle Chess 😢