public WebAssembly is a w3c standard, that allows to run high performance tasks inside the browser. These high performance tasks are executed by a WebAssembly binary (wasm), which is retrieved from the backend and invoked in a Javascript component. Hence it is not supposed for replacing Javascript, which should still be used for manipulating the DOM. For development web-assembly components, code can be written in many programming languages and then be compiled into web-assembly.

Commonly used languages

Several languages are well suited for WebAssembly. Generally these are languages, that that can compile down to the low-level binary format WASM. Examples for such languages are:

  • C and C++
  • Rust
  • AssemblyScript (AS)
  • Go

Performance

The performance of the resulting WebAssembly component depends on the language performance of the underlying language. Hence one should choose the right language. Recommended are Rust and C/C++