There have been around 40 programming languages reported to support Wasm as a compilation target. This is achieved either through direct compilation to Wasm, or through implementation of the corresponding virtual machines in Wasm. īecause WebAssembly executables are precompiled, it is possible to use a variety of programming languages to make them. While the first implementations have landed in web browsers, there are also non-browser implementations for general-purpose use, including Wasmer, Wasmtime or WAMR, wasm3, WAVM, and many others. WebAssembly implementations usually use either ahead-of-time (AOT) or just-in-time (JIT) compilation, but may also use an interpreter. But for older browsers, Wasm can be compiled into asm.js by a JavaScript polyfill. As of April 2023, 96% of installed browsers support WebAssembly (version 1.0). The support includes mobile web browsers for iOS and Android. In November 2017, Mozilla declared support "in all major browsers", after WebAssembly was enabled by default in Edge 16. Since WebAssembly's runtime environments (RE) are low level virtual stack machines (akin to JVM or Flash VM) that can be embedded into host applications, some of them have found a way to standalone runtime environments like Wasmtime and Wasmer. While WebAssembly was initially designed to enable near-native code execution speed in the web browser, it has been considered valuable outside of such, in more generalized contexts. Since April 2022, WebAssembly 2.0 is in draft status, which adds many SIMD-related instructions and a new v128 datatype, the ability for functions to return multiple values, and mass memory initialize/copy. In June 2019, Chrome 75 was released with WebAssembly threads enabled by default. In February 2018, the WebAssembly Working Group published three public working drafts for the Core Specification, JavaScript Interface, and Web API. In late September 2017, Safari 11 was released with support. In March 2017, the design of the minimum viable product (MVP) was declared to be finished and the preview phase ended. The asm.js technology already provides near-native code execution speeds and can be considered a viable alternative for browsers that don't support WebAssembly or have it disabled for security reasons. The precursor technologies were asm.js from Mozilla and Google Native Client, and the initial implementation was based on the feature set of asm.js. WebAssembly was first announced in 2015, and the first demonstration was executing Unity's Angry Bots in Firefox, Google Chrome, and Microsoft Edge. To accomplish this, WebAssembly must be much more hardware-independent than a true assembly language. The name suggests bringing assembly-like programming to the Web, where it will be executed client-side - by the website user's computer via the user's web browser. WebAssembly is named to evoke the concept of assembly language, a term which dates to the 1950s. The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) maintains the standard with contributions from Mozilla, Microsoft, Google, Apple, Fastly, Intel, and Red Hat. The main goal of WebAssembly is to enable high-performance applications on web pages, "but it does not make any Web-specific assumptions or provide Web-specific features, so it can be employed in other environments as well." It is an open standard and aims to support any language on any operating system, and in practice all of the most popular languages already have at least some level of support.Īnnounced in 2015 ( 2015) and first released in March 2017 ( 2017-03), WebAssembly became a World Wide Web Consortium recommendation on 5 December 2019 and it received the Programming Languages Software Award from ACM SIGPLAN in 2021. WebAssembly (sometimes abbreviated Wasm) defines a portable binary-code format and a corresponding text format for executable programs as well as software interfaces for facilitating interactions between such programs and their host environment.
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