WebAssembly is normally compiled from a source language, which means that developers need tools to use it. Because of that, the V8 team works on relevant open-source projects like LLVM, Emscripten, Binaryen, and WABT. This post describes some of the work we’ve been doing on Emscripten and LLVM, which will soon allow Emscripten to switch to the LLVM WebAssembly backend by default — please test it and report any issues!
There’s a saying among developers that the fastest code is code that doesn’t run. Likewise, the fastest compiling code is code that doesn’t have to be compiled. WebAssembly code caching is a new optimization in Chrome and V8 that tries to avoid code compilation by caching the native code produced by the compiler. We’ve written about how Chrome and V8 cache JavaScript code in the past, and best practices for taking advantage of this optimization. In this blog post, we describe the operation of Chrome’s WebAssembly code cache and how developers can take advantage of it to speed up loading for applications with large WebAssembly modules.
V8 v6.9 includes Liftoff, a new baseline compiler for WebAssembly. Liftoff is now enabled by default on desktop systems. This article details the motivation to add another compilation tier and describes the implementation and performance of Liftoff.
Today we’re happy to announce, in tandem with Firefox and Edge, a WebAssembly browser preview. WebAssembly or Wasm is a new runtime and compilation target for the web, designed by collaborators from Google, Mozilla, Microsoft, Apple, and the W3C WebAssembly Community Group.
For a comprehensive overview of WebAssembly and a roadmap for future community collaboration, see A WebAssembly Milestone on the Mozilla Hacks blog.
Since June 2015, collaborators from Google, Mozilla, Microsoft, Apple and the W3C WebAssembly Community Group have been hard at work designing, specifying, and implementing (1, 2, 3, 4) WebAssembly, a new runtime and compilation target for the web. WebAssembly is a low-level, portable bytecode that is designed to be encoded in a compact binary format and executed at near-native speed in a memory-safe sandbox. As an evolution of existing technologies, WebAssembly is tightly integrated with the web platform, as well as faster to download over the network and faster to instantiate than asm.js, a low-level subset of JavaScript.