WebAssembly As a High-Performance UI Engine
WebAssembly was first released in 2017. Technically speaking it is a binary instruction format for a stack-based virtual machine. WebAssembly software provides a portable C++ compile target (called Wasm, for short) that has several advantages over it’s predecessor, asm.js:
- High-level bytecode format, which eliminates the need to parse script text and precompile it for optimization. The bytecode can be run via directly translating to native instructions. Startup times of Wasm apps to load and begin execution of the code are orders of magnitude faster compared to asm.js.
- The bytecode format is a more compact way to deliver code, hence less network download.
- Wasm implements its own instruction set and is not constrained by the JavaScript language.