What’s your favorite new front-end technology? Why is it your favorite? What does it do well, where it could be improved, and how to spread its reach?
Webassembly is an exciting technology that is advancing the web as a platform in new and interesting ways. If you're not familiar with webassembly, let's do a lighting intro and then dive into the ways we can leverage this fantastic feature.
Webassembly, or wasm for short, let's us to deliver compiled code to the browser that is able to parse and execute leaps and bounds faster than our bundled JavaScript can. But don't worry, it's not going to replace JavaScript or great tooling like Webpack or Babel. It's going to supplement and help with the heavy lifting to make our web apps run at almost native speeds!
Great use cases for leveraging the power of wasm could be anything that is computationally heavy that you'd like to do in the browser. Things like gaming engines, image shaders or manipulation. You might be using wasm today and not even know. Popular tooling source-map, that lets developers find exact source files from their bundled code, is now up to 5 times faster by replacing a couple of the most intensive portions of the library with wasm! If this has piqued your interest and you would like to explore wasm in further detail check out the resources below.
Resources A cartoon intro to WebAssembly Mozilla WebAssembly Oxidizing Source Maps with Rust and WebAssembly