If you are a developer, then I’m sure you know what assembly language is. But if you don’t know the basics of assembly language, don’t fret! Because today, I’ll tell you a bit about assembly language as well as WebAssembly. Let’s first start with assembly language.
So, assembly language is a language that gives instructions to hardware. Web developers write code in words. But this isn’t enough for the computer to understand. Computers understand assembly language. This means that you have to convert your code into assembly language. Sometimes, assembly language is also referred to as ASM or asm. But what actually is WebAssembly?
Well, it’s a low-level assembly language that has near-native performance. The languages WebAssembly supports include C/C++, C#, and Rust. WebAssembly was made to work alongside JavaScript.
Furthermore, almost every WebAssembly program works in browsers. But the good news is that they also work in varying runtimes because of WASI, which is basically a modular system interface for WebAssembly. WebAssembly codes actually use portable virtual stack machines (VM). The bytecode or binary code in WebAssembly code is actually made to be faster to execute than JavaScript. Moreover, apart from executing the code, almost every Wasm engine compiles bytecode to machine code.
Now, keep in mind that Wasm isn’t a programming language. This means, in the near future, there isn’t any way Wasm will be replaced by Python and JavaScript. But by using Wasm, developers can write code in varying programming languages. This allows developers to write apps in whatever language they prefer and then package the code into Wasm form.
One difference between Wasm and JavaScript is that it provides not only compilation but also an execution environment for high-speed and compact binary code. In other words, this also means that both Wasm and JavaScript code can run at the same time.
But why should you use WebAssembly in the first place? Well, use it when you want the following benefits:
- High performance
- Uniformity in code
- Portability
Some benefits of using Wasm are speed and efficiency. In case you want to improve your app’s performance and memory footprints, use Wasm. The code in Wasm is also easy to maintain. Furthermore, thanks to the text format output, debugging in Wasm code also becomes fairly easy. What’s even better is that Wasm provides both browser and language support.
Top comments (0)