Getting Started with WebAssembly

Lansing JavaScript Meetup
March 19th, 2019

Brendon Thiede

• DevOps Engineer at the Michigan Supreme Court
• Empowering teams
• Simplifying best practices

Transpiled vs Compiled

• Transpiled: Source code → Source Code
• Compiled: Source code →
  • Bytecode
  • Assembly
  • Machine code

Binary Code Format

• W3C Standard
• Has text and compressed representations

Availability

• In all the major browsers
• Workers in Cloudflare (V8 Isolates)
• Server side

Safety and Security

• Code and data are separate
• Crashes don't throw away code
• 32-bit Pointers
• Linear memory (no holes; only grows)
• Function pointers (Function pointers are weird)

Fast

• Strongly typed
• Ahead of time optimized
• Near native speeds
• Can be smaller

Toolchains

• C++: Emscripten
• Rust (Mozilla likey)
• TypeScript: AssemblyScript
• C#: mono.wasm, Razor Components