Scott Logic / Altogether Smarter

Resources · 24 April 2018 · 1 min read

White Paper: The Web Assembles

Colin Eberhardt, Chris Price

JavaScript has been the only truly native and universally supported language on the web for more than twenty years. That’s quite an achievement for a language that was created in just 10 days!

Yet despite the runaway success of JavaScript, the language does have its flaws. The quirks and idiosyncrasies of JavaScript are very well known, however, the problems run deeper.

This white paper looks at how JavaScript works within the context of modern web applications, and shows that despite the advanced nature of out tooling, the way code is delivered and executed within the browser is surprisingly inefficient.

the Web has become the most ubiquitous application platform ever, and yet by historical accident the only natively supported programming language for that platform is JavaScript - Haas et al., PLDI 2017

WebAssembly is a new runtime for the web; a fast and efficient compilation target for a wide range of languages, that was specifically designed to address these issues. This paper looks at at the performance limits of JavaScript and how WebAssembly was designed to tackle them. We then consider the impact of WebAssembly on JavaScript and the wider web platform, making a number of predictions about the future of the web - and the potential demise of JavaScript!

If you are interested in reading more, download our white paper: “The Web Assembles” - in PDF format.

WebAssembly - and the Death of JavaScript?

This talk, from JSMonthly, looked at what's wrong with the way we are using JavaScript today and why we need WebAssembly.

Colin Eberhardt · 27^th Feb 2018

Build Your Own WebAssembly Compiler - London Node User Group - April 2019

This talk, from London Node User Group, looked at some of the internals of WebAssembly, exploring how it works ‘under the hood’ with a demonstration of how you can create your own (simple) compiler that targets this runtime.

Colin Eberhardt · 27^th Apr 2019

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Colin Eberhardt

I am CTO at Scott Logic and am a prolific technical author, blogger and speaker on a range of technologies.

My blog includes posts on a wide range of topics, including WebAssembly, HTML5 / JavaScript and data visualisation with D3 and d3fc. You'll also find a whole host of posts about previous technology interests including iOS, Swift, WPF and Silverlight.

I'm board member of FINOS, which is encouraging open source collaboration in the financial sector. I'm also very active on GitHub, contributing to a number of different projects.

Chris Price

My name is Chris Price, I'm based in Newcastle upon Tyne and work as a Software Engineer at Scott Logic. I spend my days developing web apps for financial services companies (unfortunately mostly hidden behind paywalls). I do like to blog about things when I can and do some interesting stuff on GitHub.

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White Paper: The Web Assembles

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