Is WebAssembly the Return of Flash & Java Applets?

STEVEKLABNIK.COM

In the past we’ve seen numerous attempts to bring other languages to the web, all of which have failed. It’s understandable that people would compare WebAssembly to these previous failures.

This blog post does a great job of explaining the (numerous) differences between WebAssembly and plugins. There are more than I’d thought of!

The future of WebAssembly - A look at upcoming features and proposals

SCOTTLOGIC.COM

WebAssembly is a nascent technology and the current version is very much an MVP. This blog post takes a look at the WebAssembly roadmap and the features it might gain in the near future.

There are lots of interesting new features on their way - but some surprises too - the Garbage Collection and Threads proposals aren’t what you might expect!

What if you could compile JavaScript to WebAssembly?

GITHUB.COM

Currently there are two significant obstacles stopping us from compiling JavaScript to WebAssembly, (1) Garbage Collection and (2) a lack of static typing. While (1) is partially solvable, (2) is a show stopper! Current attempts at compiling JS to WASM have had to add strict typing, e.g. AssemblyScript.

This Pull Request for Prepack suggests a very creative alternative solution. Prepack is a highly optimized bundler that uses partial evaluation - this allows it to infer types, giving a potential mechanism for wasm compilation.

And Finally …

Fancy a WebAssembly job? Microsoft’s Xamarin team are hiring!