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March 15, 2016
PC

Previewing WebAssembly experiments in Microsoft Edge

Last June, we announced the start of our journey towards implementing WebAssembly – a new, portable, size and load-time-efficient binary format suitable for compiling to the web. WebAssembly is a continuation of our previous efforts to support asm.js to bring a fast and safe compile target to the web. You can learn more about WebAssembly at the FAQ on GitHub.

Since then, we have been collaborating closely with Firefox, Chrome, WebKit and the community to keep the WebAssembly principles and design moving forward in the W3C Community Group. Today, we are excited to showcase an early preview of experimental WebAssembly support in an internal Microsoft Edge build with the AngryBots demo, alongside similar previews for Firefox and Chrome. Below is a video of the demo running in Microsoft Edge using the preliminary WebAssembly support in the Chakra engine.

Despite being an early implementation, the demo starts-up significantly faster than just using asm.js as the WebAssembly binaries have a smaller file size and parse more quickly than plain JavaScript that needs to be parsed in the asm.js case.

With ChakraCore now open source, we have been developing our WebAssembly implementation entirely in the open in the WebAssembly branch of our ChakraCore repo on GitHub. Under the hood, our implementation is able to reuse much of the existing asm.js infrastructure. The WebAssembly code goes through the same pipeline as the asm.js code would, after it has been parsed.

We are excited about WebAssembly’s progress across browsers and will continue to partner with Firefox, Chrome, WebKit and the community to advance the design and bring the power of WebAssembly to the web and future Microsoft Edge releases. You can follow WebAssembly design and ChakraCore’s implementation as we make progress on this technology.

Limin Zhu, Program Manager, Chakra