WebAssembly: When and Why You Should Use It for Your Next Project

WebAssembly (Wasm) is a relatively new runtime language designed to bridge the gap between JavaScript and native code, offering near-native performance for browser-based applications. This article will explore the scenarios where WebAssembly is particularly advantageous, as well as its intended purpose and limitations.

What Type of Problems Should You Address with WebAssembly?

WebAssembly shines in situations where near-native performance is essential, yet browser constraints necessitate a different approach. Common use cases include:

Serious Video Games: Incorporating WebAssembly can significantly enhance performance, allowing for smoother and more realistic gameplay. Games requiring complex physics, rendering, and other computationally intensive tasks benefit greatly from the speed that WebAssembly provides. Local Speech Recognition: Real-time processing of audio data can be resource-intensive. WebAssembly enables efficient and accurate speech recognition functions directly within the browser, improving user experience. Video or Photo Editing: Applications that require intense image and video processing, such as editing, filtering, and compositing, can leverage WebAssembly for enhanced performance and responsiveness. Machine Learning: For applications that involve complex Machine Learning algorithms, WebAssembly offers a balance between performance and ease of deployment compared to native applications. Computationally Intensive Numerical Calculations: Tasks like large-scale simulations, data analysis, and scientific computations can benefit from the fast execution characteristics of WebAssembly.

It's important to note that while WebAssembly can offer considerable performance enhancements, it is not intended to fully replace native applications written in low-level languages such as C and Rust. These native applications are optimized for performance, which current and foreseeable improvements in WebAssembly technology may not fully match.

Intended Usage of WebAssembly

WebAssembly is designed to run within the browser, providing a uniform runtime environment across all browsers. Its primary goal is to make web browsers more consistent and reliable, akin to a universal instruction set, ensuring that your application will behave consistently wherever it runs. While this standardization process takes time, it is a step towards improving the overall user experience on the web.

WebFrontend Infrastructure Challenges

The current web frontend infrastructure is fraught with challenges, particularly in terms of productivity and security. Each web browser exists on every consumer device, leading to significant code complexity and numerous security issues. For applications that require a thick client or distributed computing, or those involving many AI tasks, preprocessing on the data-acquiring device is essential.

However, sending real machine code directly to consumer devices is impractical due to the myriad combinations of hardware, CPU architectures, OS versions, and installed library variants. Security and the need for sandboxed execution further complicate this issue. As a solution, a backend compiler can transform intermediate code (WebAssembly) into machine code specific to the end-user's device. This approach enables efficient execution while maintaining a high level of security.

While this technology has been utilized in the latest versions of Adobe Reader installers and other applications, the web community has faced challenges in adopting LLVM infrastructure. The complexity of ensuring code security at the backend compiler stage limits the adoption of this approach. Nonetheless, the promise of improved browser performance and consistency makes WebAssembly a promising future technology.

By understanding the scenarios where WebAssembly excels and recognizing its limitations, developers can make informed decisions about when to incorporate this technology into their projects for enhanced performance and efficiency in the browser environment.