Global Information
 | |
| Paradigm | structured stack machine[1] |
|---|---|
| Designed by | W3C |
| Developer |
|
| First appeared | March 2017 |
| OS | Platform independent |
| License | Apache License 2.0 |
| Filename extensions |
|
| Website | webassembly |
| Influenced by | |
| |
WebAssembly (sometimes abbreviated Wasm) defines a portable binary-code format and a corresponding text format for executable programs[2] as well as software interfaces for facilitating interactions between such programs and their host environment.[3][4][5][6]
The main goal of WebAssembly is to enable high-performance applications on web pages, "but it does not make any Web-specific assumptions or provide Web-specific features, so it can be employed in other environments as well."[7] It is an open standard[8][9] and aims to support any language on any operating system,[10] and in practice all of the most popular languages already have at least some level of support.
Announced in 2015 and first released in March 2017, WebAssembly became a World Wide Web Consortium recommendation on 5 December 2019[11][12][13] and it received the Programming Languages Software Award from ACM SIGPLAN in 2021.[14] The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) maintains the standard with contributions from Mozilla, Microsoft, Google, Apple, Fastly, Intel, and Red Hat.[15][16]
- ^ "WebAssembly/design/Semantics.md". GitHub. Retrieved 23 February 2021.
WebAssembly code can be considered a structured stack machine; a machine where most computations use a stack of values, but control flow is expressed in structured constructs such as blocks, ifs, and loops. In practice, implementations need not maintain an actual value stack, nor actual data structures for control; they need only behave as if they did so.
- ^ Mozilla. "Understanding WebAssembly text format". MDN Web Docs. Retrieved 9 December 2019.
- ^ "Introduction — WebAssembly 1.0". webassembly.github.io. Retrieved 18 June 2019.
WebAssembly is an open standard...
- ^ "Introduction — WebAssembly 1.0". webassembly.github.io. Retrieved 18 June 2019.
WebAssembly is a ... code format
- ^ "Conventions — WebAssembly 1.0". webassembly.github.io. Retrieved 17 May 2019.
WebAssembly is a programming language that has multiple concrete representations (its binary format and the text format). Both map to a common structure.
- ^ "Introduction — WebAssembly 1.0". webassembly.github.io. Retrieved 18 June 2019.
... this specification is complemented by additional documents defining interfaces to specific embedding environments such as the Web. These will each define a WebAssembly application programming interface (API) suitable for a given environment.
- ^ "Introduction — WebAssembly 1.1". webassembly.github.io. Retrieved 19 February 2021.
Its main goal is to enable high performance applications on the Web, but it does not make any Web-specific assumptions or provide Web-specific features, so it can be employed in other environments as well.
- ^ Haas, Andreas; Rossberg, Andreas; Schuff, Derek L.; Titzer, Ben L.; Holman, Michael; Gohman, Dan; Wagner, Luke; Zakai, Alon; Bastien, JF (14 June 2017). "Bringing the Web Up to Speed with WebAssembly". SIGPLAN Notices. 52 (6): 185–200. doi:10.1145/3140587.3062363. ISSN 0362-1340.
While the Web is the primary motivation for WebAssembly, nothing in its design depends on the Web or a JavaScript environment. It is an open standard specifically designed for embedding in multiple contexts, and we expect that stand-alone implementations will become available in the future.
- ^ Cite error: The named reference
:1was invoked but never defined (see the help page). - ^ Cite error: The named reference
Wasmerwas invoked but never defined (see the help page). - ^ World Wide Web Consortium. "WebAssembly Core Specification". World Wide Web Consortium (W3). Retrieved 9 December 2019.
- ^ Couriol, Bruno. "WebAssembly 1.0 Becomes a W3C Recommendation and the Fourth Language to Run Natively in Browsers". infoq.com. Retrieved 9 December 2019.
- ^ "WebAssembly Specification — WebAssembly 1.1". webassembly.github.io. Retrieved 22 March 2021.
- ^ "Programming Languages Software Award". www.sigplan.org.
- ^ Cite error: The named reference
arswas invoked but never defined (see the help page). - ^ Cite error: The named reference
bytecodewas invoked but never defined (see the help page).