Setting up the ultimate WebAssembly (C++) workflow

medium.com

The current Emscripten-based tooling for WebAssembly is a little complex. In this article, the author describes their own toolchain set-up, which is also available on GitHub.

This isn’t the first ‘toolchain’ project we’ve seen, others include wasm-toolchain and a minimal webassembly toolkit. However, the linked-to article goes a step further, adding both JavaScript unit tests and CI scripts.

Exploring different approaches to building WebAssembly modules

blog.scottlogic.com

This post takes a look at various different approaches to creating WebAssembly modules, including Emscripten, hand-cranked toolchains (see the above article), asm.js and AssemblyScript.

The article concludes with a look at the performance of each implementation, contrasting it to other (slightly suspicious!) performance claims!

Google Chrome Extension Malware: cryptocurrency miner

medium.com

In this article Alessandro shares his story of discovering a client-side crytocurrency malware exploit. Unfortunately the computational nature of mining makes WebAssembly a good fit :-(

From the archive

Bringing the web up to speed with WebAssembly

log.acolyer.org

This joint paper with authors from Google, Microsoft, Apple and Mozilla describes the motivations behind WebAssembly and their overall design goals. They reveal how the WebAssembly stack and heap are distinct, providing a good security model, the simple validation rules that allow that allow rapid parse / validation, and much more.

Definitely worth a read!

And finally

Brendan Eich laments that WebAssembly arrived too late to halt the rise of the mobile app store.