Entry #8: Lin Clark on WebAssembly

-
"Lin Clark on WebAssembly" is a 62 minutes long podcast produced in 2018 by Software Engineering Radio with Lin Clark as a guest. The podcast talks about WebAssembly, its goals or use cases, how it interacts with the browser, how it changes the development process, its security, and the future of it.

JavaScript has been the most used programming language to develop for web browsers for the last 20 years. The browser interprets and executes code in a virtual machine that only runs JavaScript. However, JavaScript is not ideal for every task that we want to perform in a browser. WebAssembly was created to get better performance on the web and solve this problem. 

WebAssembly is a binary instruction format for a stack-based virtual machine for web browsers. It is designed like a compiler of high-level languages like C, C++, or Rust. It enables deploys for client and server web applications. Web Assembly is still under development, but, more programming languages will be added later. 

Lin Clark is an engineer on the Mozilla Developer Relations team, and she’s been working on the Web Assembly project. The WebAssembly project gives us a way of executing code in the browser faster or a place where we can execute different languages in the browser other than JavaScript.

4 components of WebAssembly are:
  • Efficient and Fast: The WebAssembly stack machine is designed to be encoded in a size- and load-time-efficient binary format. WebAssembly aims to execute at native speed with the common hardware capabilities.
  • Safe: WebAssembly describes a memory-safe, sandboxed execution environment. WebAssembly implements the same-origin and permissions security policies of the browser which runs it.
  • Open and Debuggable: WebAssembly is designed to be a textual format for debugging, testing, experimenting, optimizing, learning, teaching, and writing programs.
  • Part of the Open Web Platform: WebAssembly is designed to maintain the versionless, feature-tested, and backward-compatible nature of the web and it also supports non-web embeddings.

WebAssembly Website: https://webassembly.org
Podcast: Software Engineering Radio. (2018). SE-Radio Episode 323: Lin Clark on WebAssembly. Recovered from https://www.se-radio.net/2018/05/se-radio-episode-323-lin-clark-on-webassembly

Comentarios

Publicar un comentario

Entradas populares de este blog

Entry #7: Building Server-Side Web Language Processors

-
“Building Server-Side Web Language Processors” is an article written by Ariel Ortiz, who is my professor during the Compilers Design course. The article talks about the advantages of building a language processor that actually runs on the web, instead of a processor that just runs on a command-line shell. Creating a web language processor can be a great challenge, as it requires to have knowledge in: Compilers design, Web server creation, Front-end design, and Security Management. The strategy used by the author consists of programming a web server from scratch and should be able to serve static resources and host a language processor that generates dynamic content based on the input and send the result to the client.  The implementation uses JavaServer Pages, which allows the processor to use custom tags, that are evaluated and produce an output. One of the advantages of this implementation is that the language processor has access to all the facilities provided by the hostin
Leer más

Entry #4: Internals of GCC

-
"Internals of GCC" is a 53 minutes long podcast produced in 2007 by Software Engineering Radio with Morgan Deters as guest. GCC is a set of compilers for various languages including ADA, C, C++, Fortran, Objective C and Java at one point.  GCC provides the whole infrastructure to build software in those languages mentioned before, going from Source Code to Assembly. GCC works in three main sections, each one works in a different aspect of the compiler: Front-End: In this section, the compiler acknowledges the language we are using to generate a tree structure that shows the program description and that will pass to the next section. Middle-End: In this section, the optimization of the tree passed from the Front-End section occurs. This section makes the code more efficient and makes a transformation to a more generic code, as it takes this generic form and converts it into low-level structures called Register Transfer Language (RTL). During this process, some optimi
Leer más

Entry #2: Making Compiler Design Relevant for Students

-
“Making Compiler Design Relevant for Students who will (Most Likely) Never Design a Compiler“ is an article written by Saumya Debray in which he invites the students to understand why the Compiler Design course is so important and explains that the professors should teach in a way that their students develop skills instead of the idea of just teaching knowledge. The article shows that a compiler can be seen as a translator or as a process that can transform data expressed in one language into the same data expressed in another language. This comparison illustrates the similarity of the behavior, but also considering all the technical translation problems that can be found in common components of a language, such as ambiguity, context, and metaphors. Based on this idea of a translator, we can better understand the phases that need to be executed to obtain a result these are: Lexical Analysis and Parsing, Semantic Analysis, Code Generation, and Code Parsing. The Lexical Anal
Leer más