Supercharge your JavaScript with Web Assembly - GeekcampSG 2020

Published on: Sunday, 4 October 2020

Q&A in the description

Browser & Web APIs along with JavaScript have seen an incredible amount of enhancement over the past decade, however they still have certain limitations. With the rise of Web Assembly we can easily enhance JavaScript and give application(s) access to low-level processing & transform web experiences.

Tamas is a Google Developer Expert in Web Technologies and a Developer Evangelist. He has more than a decade of experience delivering technical training to large, prestigious organisations. Throughout his career, he has delivered presentations and training classes all over the world. He is passionate about unlocking the latest & greatest features of web development.

Slides at: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1nbIGas6B6ttunSu6LovHGxwf1x2K4_Fs/view?usp=sharing

-
Q: Do platforms like ionic and wasm have a common use case?
A: Debugging / Tracing is possible if you enable the right flags when creating your wasm module - https://emscripten.org/docs/porting/Debugging.html and Chrome has extra support for debugging as well: https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2019/12/webassembly/. Debugging — Emscripten 2.0.4 documentation

Q: Is there a way to debug/trace web assembly in the browser? any recommended plugins for such?
A: So regarding Ionic and wasm - you could create a mobile app and still utilise web assembly, since .wasm files are like any other files that you would be using on the web or in a mobile app.

Q: What do you think about blazor which doesn't require the developer to explicity write javascript? will there be a future where webassembly is first class in browsers and won't need javascript anymore? or will web be forever be tightly coupled to javascript?
A: Regarding Blazor - since I haven't used that tool, I can't really comment. Also, web assembly is a first class in browser since browser's virtual machine understands them, allocates spaces to it (which you can read/write files from/to). However I can't really predict the future whether wasm will or will not be tightly coupled to JS. It is for now and I believe it's a really good combination

-
Visit https://geekcamp.sg for more information about GeekcampSG

Organization