
The State of WebAssembly – 2022 and 2023
Share on twitter Share on linkedin Share on reddit In this article, I will look at the current state of WebAssembly (wasm). I’ll start by revisiting 2022 developments to see if any of my predictions came true and if there were any surprises. Then I’ll try to predict where I think things will go in 2023. 2022 In Review In 2021, Safari surprised me with how much work went into catching up to the other browsers’ WebAssembly support. So how did Safari do over the past year? Safari Safari has continued to improve its WebAssembly support by implementing several bug fixes and improvements, but most of its visible work went into improving the browser in other areas. Although there weren’t prominent wasm features implemented this past year compared to what happened the year before, a lot is happening under the hood. For example, in last year’s prediction, I thought fixed-width SIMD was something that Safari would implement in 2022 and round out browser support for it. Unfortunately, fixed-width SIMD didn’t make it into Safari in 2022, but it’s now complete and part of Technical Preview 161! SIMD (Single Instruction, Multiple Data) is a type of parallel processing that takes advantage of a CPU’s