Google, Mozilla and Apple have announced the WebAssembly project, a new standard to go beyond JavaScript and have faster web applications. Brendan Eich, the creator of JavaScript, is also involved in the project. WebAssembly will be a language of the bytecode type, which is at an intermediate level between programming languages ​​and machine language. The idea is to make it the new standard for all browsers on all platforms.

JavaScript has become a standard in web programming but has some limitations. The browsers must download the JavaScript programs in order to interpret them and finally run them. The consequence is that their execution only occurs at the end of those processes and consequently is slowed down.

Some projects over the years have been developed to try to improve the situation but now the inventor of JavaScript himself and some giants of the web think it’s time to move beyond this language and want to propose WebAssembly as the solution.

WebAssembly, or wasm, can avoid the limitations of JavaScript working at bytecode level, meaning that the programs won’t be in text format containing their instructions but a more abstract language. It will be more efficient for the browsers to download and run them.

It’s likely that we’ll have programs in WebAssembly and JavaScript, even side by side. That’s because the idea of this project is to complement JavaScript and allow more programming languages ​​to be used for the web. C and C++ are the ones on which the WebAssembly project is initially focused.

Concerning JavaScript, the idea is to initially create a bridge between it and WebAssembly with what is technically called a polyfill, code that extends a browser’s services. In this case it will be code capable of converting a wasm program into JavaScript to allow browsers that don’t support wasm natively to use it.

The fact that behind the WebAssembly project there are some of the biggest names of the web means that the browsers Chrome, Firefox and Safari will support it, creating a standard. At that point, the others will have to adapt or be left behind. In short, this is not one of the many projects announced by a single company and then forgotten, but presumably an important factor in the future of the web.