From asm.js to Wasm with Emscripten creator Alon Zakai - WasmAssembly

04/25/24 • 40 min

Learn about some early WebAssembly history from one of the co-creators of Wasm, Alon Zakai! Follow along how Alon explains how we came from Native Client to asm.js and then finally to WebAssembly, and explore some interesting historical and present day sidetracks on the way.

Resources: Alon Zakai: Homepage → https://goo.gle/3vVaHgi / (has links to all the social profiles, too) LinkedIn profile → https://goo.gle/4cZDqRS

Native Client (NaCl) → https://goo.gle/3Q8oAi5 Portable NaCl (PNaCL) → https://goo.gle/4413xDK Compiling LLVM to JavaScript → https://goo.gle/4ay5Qke BananaBread demo → https://goo.gle/3xCWCEO asm.js → https://goo.gle/3Q5m10n asm.js presentation → https://goo.gle/445cz2F asm.js blog posts → https://goo.gle/3U4ZcuZ Emscripten and WebAssembly presentation → https://goo.gle/3W0SAQE Bringing the Web up to speed with WebAssembly paper → https://goo.gle/3JoDq0k Polywasm → https://goo.gle/4aE9JnV Qt apps compiled to asm.js → https://goo.gle/3UmXm9O Quake 3 Arena compiled to WebAssembly → https://goo.gle/3Ukt9s1

Resources: Alon Zakai: Homepage → https://goo.gle/3vVaHgi / (has links to all the social profiles, too) LinkedIn profile → https://goo.gle/4cZDqRS

Next Episode

CG, WG, W3C, Deepti—Wasm standardization with Deepti Gandluri - WasmAssembly

In this episode, Tom interviews Deepti Gandluri, the Chair of the WebAssembly Community Group at the W3C. You will hear about the difference between the W3C WebAssembly Community Group and Working Group, how Wasm is standardized, how Deepti got into WebAssembly, and the challenges the WebAssembly team at Google faces being part of the Chrome team. Deepti also discusses her favorite Wasm features, how the Community Group might react to a browser-specific proposal, how WASI might work given browser security constraints, and new Wasm features she's excited about in the context of AI.

Resources: Episode 1 with Alon Zakai → https://goo.gle/4bpFxwV Deepti, Chair of the Community Group: → https://goo.gle/3yBtjmm Deepti, member of the Working Group → https://goo.gle/3K8NKJU WebAssembly Summit opening keynote → https://goo.gle/3WVyQP7 WebAssembly Community Group → https://goo.gle/3KaOrCM WebAssembly Working Group → https://goo.gle/3VbI48B WebAssembly W3C Process GitHub → https://goo.gle/3Kd5p3a TC39 process document → https://goo.gle/4bL3fno File System Access API → https://goo.gle/3UT5uOE Web Serial API → https://goo.gle/3WP92nq V8 Wasm source code in Chromium → https://goo.gle/4bNiUTa WebAssembly active proposals → https://goo.gle/44TBd72 WebAssembly inactive proposals → https://goo.gle/4btU6je Wasm feature detection proposal → https://goo.gle/3K9E95B JavaScript promise integration proposal → https://goo.gle/3yxfkOM JavaScript promise integration origin trial proposal → https://goo.gle/4aA8Mff WasmGC proposal → https://goo.gle/4asI6gI WasmGC → https://goo.gle/3WR7GZw WASI file system → https://goo.gle/3ylByD1 Stringref proposal → https://goo.gle/4awO68b Built-in Strings proposal → https://goo.gle/3wJ6Fbg Deepti's Google I/O talk → https://goo.gle/4boQOOk Relaxed SIMD proposal → https://goo.gle/4bNATss Half precision (FP16) proposal → https://goo.gle/3wA9rjd Memory64 proposal → https://goo.gle/3wA9rjd