Major groups have agreed to establish a web standard for a low level programming language; like what Assembly is in the world of programming but for the web. This will allow for much smaller data transfers with binary applications accepted across all major Web browsers.
My thoughts… WebAssembly may permit other scripting languages to be built on top of it. If it’s like the path from Assemby to C* to Ruby, why not Ruby on top of WebAssembly? I’m just imaging a whole new world of possibilities with this. Imagine Ruby the size of a jQuery library .
The team notes that the idea here is not to replace JavaScript, by the
way, but to allow many more languages to be compiled for the Web.
-TechCrunch
I can’t imagine how this is going to work. All Assembly does is manipulate CPU registers. I can’t even think of the equivalent for the web. Besides, we already have a way to control the size of data transfers at a minute level: it’s called the TC protocol. Other than come up with a language that allows us to create and manage TCP packets, I don’t know what can be achieved by this WebAssembly.
May be I’m over-thinking this or maybe I’m just old and cynical. In any case, anything that can make Ruby smaller and faster will certainly get my vote.
I haven’t really looked into it, but how can it be a new language yet at the same time not be intended to replace JS?
Or do they mean that WebAssembly is what will be adopted by and run in all browsers and then languages like JavaScript and Ruby and Python etc will compile into it? If so that sounds awesome
In the meantime, I thank our lucky stars we’ve got Opal (and I wonder if @adambeynon is already planning OpalAssembly, hehe).
I haven’t looked into it all, but seems like they talking about something like a JVM spec, but for your browser’s scripting engine. Javascript or Ruby or Whatever just generates byte code that is executed in the WebAssembly engine.
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(and I wonder if