
The State of WebAssembly – 2021 and 2022
In this article, I’m going to take the same approach that I used last year to show you the current state of WebAssembly. I’ll look at the big events of the past year and then try to predict where I think things are going in 2022. 2021 in Review This past year turned out to be a much bigger year for WebAssembly than I was expecting, especially around the Safari web browser. Safari When the MVP of WebAssembly was released back in 2017, Safari was right there with the same features as the rest of the browsers. In the years that followed, Safari unfortunately fell behind. Over 2021, I was very pleased to see a lot of work put into Safari to bring its WebAssembly support up to date. As of the Safari 15.2 release on December 14th, some of the features added to Safari over 2021 include: Streaming Compilation Bulk Memory Operations Addressable Memory can now reach 4GB Exception Handling Support for the COOP (Cross-Origin-Opener-Policy) and COEP (Cross-Origin-Embedder-Policy) response headers Atomic Instructions The re-enabling of the SharedArrayBuffer for sites that use the COOP/COEP response header SharedArrayBuffer WebAssembly uses the SharedArrayBuffer to share memory between WebAssembly threads. Unfortunately, the buffer