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WebAssembly

Cross-platform assembly language and bytecode designed for execution in web browsers / From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

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WebAssembly (sometimes abbreviated Wasm) defines a portable binary-code format and a corresponding text format for executable programs[2] as well as software interfaces for facilitating interactions between such programs and their host environment.[3][4][5][6]

Quick facts: Paradigm, Designed by, Developer, First&...
WebAssembly
WebAssembly_Logo.svg
Paradigmstructured; stack machine[1]
Designed byW3C
Developer
First appearedMarch 2017; 6 years ago (2017-03)
OSPlatform independent
LicenseApache License 2.0
Filename extensions
  • .wat (text format)
  • .wasm (binary format)
Websitewebassembly.org
Influenced by
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The main goal of WebAssembly is to enable high-performance applications on web pages, "but it does not make any Web-specific assumptions or provide Web-specific features, so it can be employed in other environments as well."[7] It is an open standard[8][9] and aims to support any language on any operating system,[10] and in practice all of the most popular languages already have at least some level of support.

Announced in 2015 (2015) and first released in March 2017 (2017-03), WebAssembly became a World Wide Web Consortium recommendation on 5 December 2019[11][12][13] and it received the Programming Languages Software Award from ACM SIGPLAN in 2021.[14] The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) maintains the standard with contributions from Mozilla, Microsoft, Google, Apple, Fastly, Intel, and Red Hat.[15][16]