What Is WebAssembly?

Chapter 3. WebAssembly in Practice

WebAssembly is a very new technology, with support announced for “all major browsers” as recent as November 2017. Since then, a great many companies and enthusiastic developers have been experimenting with this technology, creating fascinating and exciting prototypes. However, there are a small number of companies who are already using this technology in production. This chapter takes a look at some of the WebAssembly early adopters and what they are doing with this technology.

Computer Aided Design: AutoCAD

AutoCAD is a very popular Computer Aided Design (CAD) package that supports engineers, architects, and designers across a wide range of industries. The first version of AutoCAD was written in C++ and released in 1982, which makes it more than 10 years older than JavaScript!

In 2010, the AutoCAD team launched a web-based version of its desktop AutoCAD tool using the Flash plug-in, later replacing it with HTML5/JavaScript. However, in both cases the web version of AutoCAD had a limited feature set, for the most part due to the prohibitive cost of migrating a 12-million-lines-of-code application to the web.

The AutoCAD team immediately saw the promise of WebAssembly when it was released in 2017, and sought to use Emscripten to compile its desktop C++ codebase and run it in the browser. Early experiments proved very successful, and the WebAssembly-based version of the product was announced at Google’s I/O conference in 2018.

This C++ core running ...