
The State of WebAssembly – 2020 and 2021
With the start of a new year, it’s common to reflect on what happened over the past year and plan for the upcoming year. In this article, I’m going to look at the state of WebAssembly in 2020 and where I see things going this year. Before we jump in, for those of you who may be unaware of what WebAssembly is, I’ll give you a quick primer. What is WebAssembly? WebAssembly, which you might also see abbreviated as Wasm, is a low-level assembly-like language that is designed to be safe, fast, compact, portable, and a compilation target. That’s a bit of a mouthful but, basically, it’s not designed to be written by hand. You use a higher-level language and compile to it. The files are designed to be as small as possible so that they can be transferred and downloaded quickly. They’re also structured in such a way as to optimize validation and parsing so that the module can start up as quickly as possible. From the beginning, the desire was to be able to use WebAssembly modules outside the browser as well but the initial work was in the browser. Regardless of where they’re used, you need to