As a result, one of the early emerging practical-use cases for WebAssembly is games developers looking to produce high-end games that run in browser. Epic Games has demonstrated a version of the Unreal Engine that runs in-browser as a wasm module.
WebAssembly is also designed to integrate with existing JavaScript engines, which mean the two platforms’ modules should be interoperable. Wasm modules can be imported into JavaScript code, which can then take advantage of its functionality. Currently WebAssembly cannot access the DOM or web APIs directly, but it can use JavaScript to do so.
Also, there’s nothing constraining WebAssembly to run only in-browser, and it’s expected it will be ported to other platforms. This could make it significantly easier to build cross-platform apps that support web and native environments.
Security implications
You might be wondering about the security implications of WebAssembly, since this is a general concern for low-level languages. Rather than being true native machine code, however, wasm is designed to execute in sandboxed environment, and adheres to the same security constraints as JavaScript does in browser.
If you want to get started with WebAssembly, Emscripten is a compiler that supports C and C++ compilation and conversion of existing applications. You won’t find too many production applications using it yet, but it represents another step to bridging the gap between browser and native software. This is definitely one to keep an eye on, and if you’re not building wasm modules, you could well be consuming them soon.
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