Over the past couple of years, a number of radical innovations have shaped the web development ecosystem, but few are as exciting as WebAssembly-or Wasm for short. This is a technology trumpeted as the future for high-performance web applications-enabling developers to craft web experiences that are as fast as native applications. Below, we will dive deeper into what makes WebAssembly so powerful and why it is a game-changer for the web, and how you might start leveraging it to improve your applications.
What is WebAssembly?
WebAssembly, more commonly referred to as Wasm, is a binary instruction format that runs at near-native speed in browsers. It enables code written in languages that compile into it, such as C, C++, Rust, and others, to run directly in the browser. WebAssembly runs faster by a large margin because it uses precompiled machine code, whereas JavaScript is interpreted.
In other words, WebAssembly allows Web developers to create applications that require heavy computation, such as video editing, gaming, or even 3D modeling, directly in the browser without performance penalties.