In this short talk, we will discuss how it can extend the capabilities of the web as a software plaftorm by examining its existing and planned features.

1. Assembly thy Web

2. Martin Ockajak from Zürich
Software Engineer
@martin_ockajak

3. Outline
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Introduction
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Technical details
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Future

4. Introduction

5. What is WebAssembly
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Virtual instruction set architecture
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Bytecode for the web browser
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Backed by major browser vendors
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Formats
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Text (Assembly Language)
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Binary (Virtual Machine Code)
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Evolved from its predecessors
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Java Applets, ActiveX, PNaCl, asm.js & Emscripten @ LLVM

6. How does it work

7. Source languages
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C / C++
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LLVM, Emscripten, Binaryen & WABT
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Objective-C ?
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Swift ?
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Rust ?

8. Benefits
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Close to native performance
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Small application size
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Quick decoding (20x faster)
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Portability
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Security

9. Use cases
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Image & video processing
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Virtual & augmented reality
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Simulation & visualization
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Development tools
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Games

10. Technical details

11. Formats

12. Instruction set
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Integer and floating point data types
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Basic constructs
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Blocks
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Typed functions
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Calls
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Conditionals
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Loops
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Type checking for direct & indirect calls
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Similar to JVM bytecode or CIL

13. Memory model
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Sandboxed linear memory
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Can be grown programatically
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Indexed tables
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Typed elements
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Indexed local & global variables
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Mutable or immutable

14. Dynamic linking
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Modules
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Distributable units of code
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Imports & exports
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Module & object name
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Integration with ES6 modules

15. Security
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Indexed function calls & variables
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Branch target validation
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Shadow stack
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Invalid address causes an exception
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Same origin policy & CORS

16. Future

17. High-level features
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Garbage collection
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Zero-cost exceptions
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Threads & processes
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Tail-call optimization
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Source maps
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Potential source languages
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Haskell, Scala, Python, Java, Go

18. Additional features
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DOM & Web APIs access
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Streaming compilation
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Just-in-time compilation
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SIMD instructions
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Coroutines

19. Thank you :-)