Work Continues On WebAssembly For Low-Level, In-Browser Computing

Work continues on the WebAssembly project that's the joint effort by Mozilla, Google, Microsoft, and Apple to allow C/C++ (and potentially other languages) to target a virtual ISA that would be executed within the web-browser.

WebAssembly is a virtual ISA designed around allowing portable code, compatibility across different browsers, a small download footprint, and other traits for effective client-side browser scripting. Much of WebAssembly's development continues to happen on its LLVM back-end.

Just the other day I meant to write about WebAssembly having initial linking support inside LLVM. Now Mozilla has written a lengthy blog post about compiling to WebAssembly.

The Mozilla Hacks blog post covers a new project called Binaryen that provides a compiler infrastructure library written in C++. An alternative to using Binaryen is using the well-known EmScripten project for compiling to WebAssembly. Lastly is the experimental LLVM WebAssembly back-end with Emscripten.

More details on these different approaches for compiling to WebAssembly's binary format can be found via the Mozilla Hacks blog.