WebAssembly

in action

@mafintosh

Low level programming for the web

What is assembly?

Machine friendy language that compiles to machine code

1 + 2

→ assembly

push 1
push 2
add
    

push 1  →  0x1 0x1
push 2  →  0x1 0x2
add     →  0x3
    

Assembly is close to the metal

Almost no abstractions

Hard to maintain

Use assembly to implement STABLE functions that are super FAST

Hash functions, video encoding, cryptography

WebAssembly is assembly for the web

Node.js 8+, Chrome, Firefox, Safari 11, Edge preview

WAST is a Lisp like language that compiles to WebAssembly

npm install -g webassembly-binary-tools
wast2wasm example.wat -o example.wasm
    

(demo)

npm install -g wast2js
wast2js example.wat -o example.js
    

npm install -g wast2js
wast2js example.wat -wo example.js
    

(demo)

LOTS of instructions

http://webassembly.org/docs/semantics

When operating on non-numbers (buffers / strings) you have to copy data and use pointers

(demo)

WebAssembly will massively speed up algorithms that rely on 64 bit integers

BLAKE2b is a very fast hash function that does exactly that

npm install blake2b

https://github.com/mafintosh/siphash24 https://github.com/mafintosh/blake2b-wasm https://github.com/mafintosh/webassembly-binary-tools https://github.com/mafintosh/wast2js http://webassembly.org/docs/semantics

Thank you!