WebAssembly: The Definitive Guide

Preface

I believe WebAssembly is an ascendant technology that has the potential to transform the entire software development industry in one form or another. I do not believe WebAssembly is going to be transformative because I am writing a book on the topic. I’m writing a book on it because I believe it will be transformative.

Presumably you are interested in the technology as well. The problem is, I think I have less of an idea of who you are as a reader than many authors do. If this were a book about a particular programming language or a specific topic, there would be a self-selecting aspect to the audience and I could proceed apace. But WebAssembly is a much larger topic than most people realize, and I am trying to paint a very large picture with this book. Most of the other books that have been published have focused on a single aspect of it, and I can understand why.

Some of you might think WebAssembly is a technology for killing JavaScript. It isn’t. Some of you may think it is about bringing applications to the browser. It is that, but it is also so much more. It is useful on the server side, in the video game world, as a plug-in mechanism, in support of serverless functions and edge computing, in embedded systems, for the blockchain, and in many other topics we will investigate together. This is the first attempt I know of to be this comprehensive with the topic, and I felt it was important to tell this more complete version.

In the lead-up to the publication of this ...