A Web of Infinite Possibilities
Once upon a time, you could do all sort of crazy things on the web like run Java programs, and build animations using Flash. There were no standards, so developers had to make different versions of every website they built so that they’re compatible with the browsers at the time. The web saw both a rise in creativity, and in really serious security vulnerabilities, as it became exponentially harder to develop for it. With the adoption of (much needed) web standards and the dotCom crash, the focus has shifted to stabilizing and unifying the way we build, consume, and think about the web, and naturally some of the technologies died along the way being unable to keep up. The web as most of us know it today became variations of the same ideas and ways of building, with one language to rule the ecosystem : JavaScript. Some also argue that the web became ‘serious,’ corporate, and a way to make money, to the detriment of creativity and innovation. But the idea of running other languages on the web was still in people’s hearts, so a new glimmer of hope was born, and named WebAssembly or WASM. Simply put, WASM provides other languages like C++ and Rust a compilation target so that they can run on the web. All designed to nicely play alongside JavaScript. How exciting is that!? In this talk, we will explore WASM as a way of bringing things that are not of the web, to the web. We will discuss how WebAssembly can open the web to even more engineers and creators, and boost creativity and innovation in a secure way.