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Over the past few years, a new technology called Web Assembly has been gaining traction as a way to significantly improve performance in web applications.
Web Assembly provides near-native speeds while still leveraging the convenience of web languages like JavaScript, C/C++ and Rust.
Traditionally, web apps have faced bottlenecks around performance, security sandboxing, portability and compatibility across different browsers and devices.
But Web Assembly aims to change that dynamic by compiling languages down to a low-level byte code that runs in the browser just like JavaScript, while avoiding its pitfalls.
Let’s explore a few key capabilities driving adoption of Web Assembly:
Near-Native Performance
Web Assembly executes at speeds much closer to native machine code than JavaScript interpretations, leading to massive speed improvements. This allows smooth usage of graphics/animation, 3D games, video editing and other complex apps in the browser.
Safe Execution Sandbox
Code complies to a well-defined specification for safely executing within the browser context across platforms. This prevents instability while avoiding heavyweight virtual machines.
