WebAssembly

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WebAssembly

Influenced by

Paradigm	Imperative, structured, expression-oriented
Designed by	W3C
Developer	W3C Mozilla Microsoft Google Apple
First appeared	March 2017; 3 years ago
Typing discipline	Static
License	Apache License 2.0
Filename extensions	.wat .wasm
Website	webassembly.org
asm.js PNaCl

WebAssembly (often shortened to Wasm) is an open standard that defines a portable binary-code format for executable programs, and a corresponding textual assembly language, as well as interfaces for facilitating interactions between such programs and their host environment.[1][2][3][4] The main goal of WebAssembly is to enable high-performance applications on web pages, but the format is designed to be executed and integrated in other environments as well.[5][6]

WebAssembly became a World Wide Web Consortium recommendation on 5 December 2019[7] and, alongside HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, is the fourth language to run natively in browsers.[8] In order to use Wasm in browsers, users may use Emscripten SDK to compile C++ (or any other LLVM-supported language such as D or Rust) source code into a binary file which runs in the same sandbox as regular JavaScript code.[note 1] Emscripten provides bindings for several commonly used environment interfaces like WebGL. There is no direct Document Object Model (DOM) access; however, it is possible to create proxy functions for this, for example through stdweb,[13] web_sys,[14] and js_sys[15] when using Rust language.