WebAssembly

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

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