A Real-World WebAssembly Benchmark
PSPDFKIT.COM
The team at PSPDFKit were WebAssembly early-adopters, using the technology to provide PDF rendering within the browser. This involved taking 500,000 lines of C++ and compiling it to WebAssembly.
In this blog post the team have taken their PDF engine and turned it into a performance benchmark for the browser, allowing you to compare various performance characteristics. The results are fascinating - better still, they have been in discussion with the browser vendors to find out where and how they plan to improve performance. Great job!
Making calls to WebAssembly Fast
BENJ.ME
One area of WebAssembly performance that hasn’t gained much attention yet is the overhead of the JS / WASM interface boundary. Thankfully this has changed in FireFox, this post describes how they’ve significantly simplified their approach, removing a whole layer of C++ glue code, with impressive results.
Better still, the FireFox team have also come up with an initial implementation of reference types - the first step towards garbage collection. Exciting stuff!
Go 1.11 WebAssembly for Gophers
ZENIKA.ME
WebAssembly support for Go is just a few weeks old. This blog post does a great job of describing how to write your first WebAssembly application with Go.
Hijacking WebAssembly Control Flow
FASTLY.COM
Last week we saw a whole host of article about WebAssembly bringing back Spectre and Meltdown. Honestly, I think they were all tripe!
This is another security-focussed blog post, but a better one. It takes a look at how type confusion attacks can be compiled to WebAssembly.