WebAssembly, announced last year in June, is a phenomenal effort put together by the W3C, and backed by Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge, and Apple Safari browsers, to develop a binary format for web-based applications. According to the WebAssembly design guidelines, the new file format would allow developers to compile their “code” to a binary, which will then be executed inside each browser’s JavaScript engine.
Before we go any further however I want to make one thing extremely clear. WebAssembly is not a javascript replacement. It’s not out there for you’re mega-menu’s and you’re image lightboxes. WebAssembly is intended to be used for complex data visualizations, extremely large JS-driven Web or mobile applications, and Web-based animations.
It is with these types of projects that WebAssembly will truly shine, with preliminary tests showing it to be already 23 times faster than similar JavaScript applications optimized through Mozilla’s asm.js, and 20-30% smaller when it comes to actual file size.
Today, a huge milestone has passed for WebAssembly as Google, then Microsoft, and then Mozilla, announced that they’ve added initial support for WebAssembly files in their browsers. WebAssembly still has a long way to go before it’s ready for a full on public release – however if you’re running a supported browser you can head on over here and try out the demo WebAssembly game – Angry Bots.