I just want to start this issue with a big shout-out to the Fermyon team who I bumped into at the Linux Foundation Europe Summit. I don’t often have the opportunity to meet members of the WebAssembly community in person. It was great to meet their enthusiastic and passionate team and chat about the future potential of this technology.
Adobe to Acquire Figma
ADOBE.COM
Adobe has recently announced that it will acquire Figma, a collaborative design platform, for $20bn. As you can imagine, this acquisition has been met with a combination of excitement and concern, but I’ll not go into that here. What I do want to highlight is that Figma were an early adopter of WebAssembly, with the technology being an important part of their overall solution.
Here are a few posts from their blog which are worth reading:
- Building a professional design tool on the web (2015)
- WebAssembly cut Figma’s load time by 3x (2017)
- How to build a plugin system on the web and also sleep well at night (2019)
- An update on plugin security (2019)
WebAssembly Users a Mix of Backend and Full Stack Developers
THENEWSTACK.IO
A few months ago I published the state of WebAssembly 2022 survey results. I’m a great believer in sharing survey data alongside the summarised results. This allows others to verify your findings and create new insights, which is exactly what Lawrence Hecht has done here.
By further segmenting the data, based on respondents knowledge of WebAssembly, or wether they are back-end or front-end developers, new patterns emerge. For example, Blazor (C#), which has shown a significant rise in popularity, tends to be tha target language for those that who know least about WebAssembly itself. Fascinating stuff.
PythonFiddle: Fully private client-side sample code execution and sharing
LEANINGTECH.COM
Online playgrounds have become very popular recently, they allow developers to try out tools and frameworks without the need to install anything locally. If you’re developing JavaScript tooling, whether client-side or server-side, creating an online playground is quite straightforward. With WebAssembly, there is now the opportunity to create fully client-side playgrounds that execute a wide range of languages. In this blog post, the Leaning Tech team share how they created PythonFiddle a client-side Python playground.
The journey of Queso, my programming language
JUDEHUNTER.DEV
Creating your own programming language is fun, and trust me, not as difficult as it might sound. This blog post describes Queso, a pet-project that Jude has been working on for some time. Most recently he’s added support for compilation to WebAssembly, and has also created a new compiler infrastructure library along the way.