Someday you'll code for the web in any language, and it'll run at near-native speed

18 Jun 2015 at 09:58, Neil McAllister

 

Brendan Eich, the former CEO of Mozilla, has announced a new project that could not only speed up web applications but could eventually see the end of JavaScript as the lingua franca of web development.

 

Dubbed WebAssembly, the new effort is a kind of successor to Asm.js, the stripped-down JavaScript dialect that backers describe as an "assembly language for the web." Like Asm.js, it executes via a JavaScript engine. The difference is that WebAssembly is a new, low-level binary format, like a bytecode, which allows it to load and run even faster than Asm.js.

 

The long-term goal, Eich said, is for WebAssembly to become a kind of binary object format for the web, one that can be used as a compiler target for all kinds of languages - including but not limited to JavaScript.

 

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