What the Heck is WebAssembly, and do I Have to Learn C Now?

Presented by @callahad at Web Unleashed 2016, October 4th, 2016.

Note: As of October 2016, you must use Firefox Nightly and manually set javascript.options.wasm to true in about:config, or use Chrome Canary and enable "Experimental WebAssembly" in chrome://flags for native WebAssembly to work.

Note: At the end of September, version 12 ("0xc") of the experimental WebAssembly binary format was released, which changed WebAssembly from a pure AST to a stack-based bytecode. Support for 0xc in browsers and compilers is not yet finished, but should be soon.

• View the slides (GitHub Pages)
• View the repo (GitHub)
• Spinning Cube demo (Wasm only, Wasm with asm.js fallback)

Links and Other Resources:

• webassembly.github.io — W3C WebAssembly Community Group's homepage
• WebAssembly Explorer — Interactive, browser-based interface to the LLVM/Emscripten/Binaryen toolchain
• Emscripten — Compiler C/C++ to JavaScript/asm.js
• Binaryen — Compiler from asm.js to wasm
• PyPy.js — The PyPy Python interpreter compiled into asm.js
• PyPy.js: What? How? Why? — Ryan Kelly's talk on PyPy.js at PyCon 2015
• Asm.js Chess Battle — Microsoft's demo of asm.js vs non-asm.js performance
• PCE.js — A Mac Plus emulator compiled to asm.js and running Mac OS System 7
• AngryBots demo — Unity Engine game exported to WebAssembly and asm.js
• Porting Examples and Demos — Other C/C++ applications ported to the Web with Emscripten Wiki

Good Blog Posts / Presentations

• NYLUG Presents: Luke Wagner -on- WebAssembly: A New Compiler Target For The Web — Longer version of this presentation, but by the WebAssembly co-chair himself
• Creating a WebAssembly binary and running it in a browser — Mikael Lundin's dissection of WebAssembly binaries
• "A WebAssembly Milestone: Experimental Support in Multiple Browsers" — Also see the coordinated announcements from Google and Microsoft
• "Compiling to WebAssembly: It’s Happening!" — Overview of Binaryen and LLVM's upcoming WebAssembly backend
• Emscripten and WebAssembly — Presentation from the Emscripten developer on the WebAssembly toolchain