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Boosting WebAssembly Performance with SIMD and Multi-Threading
Early implementations of WebAssembly's SIMD and multi-threading proposals show that WebAssembly is narrowing the gap with native performance, by using SIMD instructions and multicore CPUs. Significant performance improvements have been observed in compute-intensive tasks (machine-learning, bio-informatics, scientific computing).
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Server-Side Wasm - Q&A with Michael Yuan, Second State CEO
WebAssembly can be used server-side to provide the performance required by use cases such as blockchains and edge AI services. Non-standard extensions may address those use cases today, possibly weakening WebAssembly portability benefits. The gathered experience may however provide important inputs to current and future WebAssembly proposals.
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Server-Side Wasm: Today and Tomorrow - Q&A with Connor Hicks
At QCon this year, Connor Hicks presented the opportunities linked to using Web Assembly outside of the browser. Hicks addressed current and future server-side use cases for WebAssembly. He explained how Wasm and its ecosystem allow developers to craft serverless applications by declaratively composing serverless functions written in different languages.
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Improving Webassembly and Its Tooling -- Q&A with Wasmtime’s Nick Fitzgerald
WebAssembly, now a web standard, aims to grow beyond the browser. Wasm runtimes are implementing proposals to achieve this vision. Fitzgerald tells us about his recent work on WebAssembly tooling and his implementation of reference types in the Wasmtime WebAssembly runtime -- a prelude to interface types and easy interoperation between Wasm and a host language.
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Level Up with WebAssembly - Book Review and Q&A
WebAssembly is a difficult-to-learn technological stack, with rough edges and a fast-moving target. Porting existing software to WebAssembly and the web remains a complex endeavor. Level Up With WebAssembly strives to give a practitioner perspective to porting C/C++ software to browsers. The book is highly practical and includes recipes to successfully convert software to the web.
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Deno Loves WebAssembly
The much anticipated Deno project has finally reached v1.0! Deno is created by the original developer of Node.js, Ryan Dahl, to address what he called “10 things I regret about Node.js”. Without an NPM-like system to incorporate native modules, how do we write server-side applications that require native performance on Deno? WebAssembly is here to help!
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WebAssembly at Sentry - Q&A with Armin Ronacher
Sentry sees great potential in WebAssembly and uses it internally in the context of its ingestion system. However, further usage is hampered by the limited capabilities of WebAssembly when debugging in production. While proposals exist to make the DWARF standard debugging format work with Wasm, more work and better tooling are necessary. InfoQ interviews Sentry's Armin Ronacher.
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How to Use Encryption for Defense in Depth in Native and Browser Apps
Isaac Potoczny-Jones discusses the pros and cons of application-layer encryption. He covers the attack surface of application-layer encryption in the browser, how it is very different from native clients, and how WebCrypto helps.
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Mono: from Xamarin to WebAssembly, Blazor, and .NET 5 - Q&A with Miguel de Icaza
Mono started as an open source .NET platform in 2001, being developed by Xamarin until 2011. Since the company’s acquisition by Microsoft in 2016, both Mono and .NET Core have been developed in parallel. In the light of the most recent releases, InfoQ interviewed Miguel de Icaza —the original author of the Mono project—to talk about the current state of Mono and its future in the .NET ecosystem.
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Porting a Desktop Game Editor to the Browser with WebAssembly
Florian Rival, software engineer at Google and creator of the GDevelop game editor, discusses the lessons learnt from porting a native desktop game editor to the browser with WebAssembly. InfoQ interviewed Rival on the technical challenges encountered, the benefits derived from the port, and tips for developers thinking about porting desktop applications with WebAssembly.
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WebAssembly and Blazor: A Decades Old Problem Solved
A framework, named Blazor because it runs in the browser and leverages a templating system or "view engine" called Razor, enables the scenario .NET developers almost gave up on. It doesn't just allow developers to build client-side code with C#, but also allows developers to run existing .NET Standard DLLs in the browser without a plugin. Here's the story of WebAssembly and Blazor.