Bringing the web up to speed with WebAssembly

By Andreas Haas, Andreas Rossberg, Derek L. Schuff, Ben L. Titzer, Michael Holman, Dan Gohman, L. Wagner, Alon Zakai, JF Bastien. ACM-SIGPLAN Symposium on Programming Language Design and Implementation, 2017

795 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The maturation of the Web platform has given rise to sophisticated and demanding Web applications such as interactive 3D visualization, audio and video software, and games. With that, efficiency and security of code on the Web has become more important than ever. Yet JavaScript as the only built-in language of the Web is not well-equipped to meet these requirements, especially as a compilation target. Engineers from the four major browser vendors have risen to the challenge and collaboratively designed a portable low-level bytecode called WebAssembly. It offers compact representation, efficient validation and compilation, and safe low to no-overhead execution. Rather than committing to a specific programming model, WebAssembly is an abstraction over modern hardware, making it language-, hardware-, and platform-independent, with use cases beyond just the Web. WebAssembly has been designed with a formal semantics from the start. We describe the motivation, design and formal semantics of WebAssembly and provide some preliminary experience with implementations.

Subfields: Artificial Intelligence, Hardware and Architecture

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/8ca3ef3dd0f6ed54aeb0922434d9ceef41c57a92

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Citations in the corpus

Fast Sparse ConvNets (2019, methodology): “Frameworks generally support using WebAssembly (Wasm) [11] to run on CPUs or WebGL to run on GPUs.”
A scalable verification solution for blockchains (2019, methodology): “WebAssembly has become increasingly ready-to-use due to contributions and testing by Apple, Google, Microsoft, and Mozilla [45].”
A Race-Track Trapped-Ion Quantum Processor (2023, methodology): “0++, which allows for real-time decision making, and (2) a more capable classical compute environment, utilizing Web Assembly (Wasm) [43], that can execute complex calculations.”
Faasm: Lightweight Isolation for Efficient Stateful Serverless Computing (2020, methodology): “A function associated with a Faaslet, together with its library and language runtime dependencies, is compiled to WebAssembly [29].”
CLARC: C/C++ Benchmark for Robust Code Search (2026, unknown): “Furthermore, the poor performance of general-purpose embedding models like OpenAI-text-embedding-large and Voyage-code-3 on low-level languages underscores the need for specialized solutions for retrieval tasks involving Assembly or WebAssembly.”