WebAssembly is not a replacement for JavaScript .
One of the most powerful innovations in recent past decades for the internet, WebAssembly is an open standard that defines a portable binary-code format for executable programs. It is fast and portable in the real sense. What makes it really useful is the fact that most of the programming languages including Rust and C++ have wasm as the compile target. Rust is a very powerful language because of its efficient memory management. More than 9 companies including Dropbox, Coursera, Figma, npm, Microsoft, Cloudflare, Facebook, Amazon and Discord use Rust for one or the other things. Seeing such great benefits of WebAssembly, We wonder “Will WebAssembly replace JavaScript?”
This is one of the most frequently asked questions nowadays. So let’s do a quick comparison to see if WebAssembly can replace JS or not.
In this blog, we will try to find when JavaScript performs better than wasm and when wasm is better than JS. Also, we will see how wasm works and why is it a good choice for web deployment.
An Alternative for JS
We’ve been using JavaScript as the only programming language that is native to web browsers and then we saw WebAssembly coming. But what actually WebAssembly is. Let’s look at the definition of wasm.
WebAssembly, generally called wasm, is a compact, fast and portable code that can run on most browsers. WebAssembly is a binary instruction format similar to byte code in java. This code can not be understood by us but by a stack-based virtual machine. A stack-based virtual machine is a virtual machine that considers the operands of all the instructions as they are on a stack.
We generally don’t write code in wasm.** Wasm** is a compilation target for many programming languages. Many languages compile their code to wasm, making it easier to transfer on the web for deployment purposes.
One more thing, wasm is neither an assembly language nor it’s not built for a specific machine.
What it does is compile higher-level languages and then run those web apps in the browser a lot faster than JavaScript.
#rust #javascript #js #webassembly
