Ben Smith, chair of the WebAssembly community group, recalled at WebAssembly Summit the beginnings of WebAssembly and how it has increased and refined its scope and capabilities.

Smith started by looking enthusiastically at the audience, reminiscing that:

5 years ago, WebAssembly literally did not even exist.

The idea of compiling C and C++ code to run in browsers went beyond the proof-of-concept phase in 2013 thanks to emscripten and asm.js. Alon Zakai, who founded emscripten in 2010 and co-created WebAssembly and asm.js, provided concrete evidence that C and C++ programs could be ported to the web.

#webassembly #wasm #web-development