Brian Sletten - WebAssembly: The Definitive Guide: Safe, Fast, and Portable Code

• 2021-12-01: First Release

I believe WebAssembly is an ascendant technology that has thepotential to transform the entire software development industry in oneform or another. I do not believe WebAssembly is going to betransformative because I am writing a book on the topic. Im writinga book on it because I believe it will be transformative.

Presumably you are interested in the technology as well. The problemis, I think I have less of an idea of who you are as a reader thanmany authors do. If this were a book about a particular programminglanguage or a specific topic, there would be a self-selecting aspectto the audience and I could proceed apace. But WebAssembly is a muchlarger topic than most people realize, and I am trying to paint a verylarge picture with this book. Most of the other books that have beenpublished have focused on a single aspect of it, and I can understandwhy.

Some of you might think WebAssembly is a technology for killing JavaScript. Itisnt. Some of you may think it is about bringing applications to thebrowser. It is that, but it is also so much more. It is useful on theserver side, in the video game world, as a plug-in mechanism, insupport of serverless functions and edge computing, in embeddedsystems, for the blockchain, and in many other topics we will investigatetogether. This is the first attempt I know of to be this comprehensivewith the topic, and I felt it was important to tell this morecomplete version.

In the lead-up to the publication of this book, I have mostly gottenpositive support and excitement from people I have spoken to about theproject. One limited form of pushback I have gotten is with respect tothe title. Some folks felt it was premature to have The DefinitiveGuide for this new of a technology. That is a fair position to take,but because I am trying to describe an extremely big and encompassingtechnical landscape, I thought it was reasonable. I hope by the end ofthe book you agree.

All I ask is that you have an open mind and a bit ofpatience. WebAssembly touches a lot of languages, runtimes, andoperational environments. In addition to teaching you about thelow-level details, we will look at integrations with the dominantprogramming languages in this space and several different use cases. Ihave tried not to make too many assumptions about your background, so Ihave heavily annotated the text with breadcrumbs for furtherexploration and discovery via footnotes. If you are a more advanceddeveloper just seeking details about WebAssembly, feel free to ignorethese and dont take offense. I expect a rather wide audience will beat least perusing this book, and I want them to feel welcome, too.

If you are on the junior side development-wise, this will be achallenging book. But I have tried to make it possible for you to atleast see what is going on. Consider the various links and referencesas a personal guide into a more sophisticated developmentreality. Dont get overwhelmed, just tackle things one at a time inwhatever order interests you or makes sense. There is no single wayinto this industry, and however you get there is legitimate.

At the end of the day, WebAssembly is going to allow us to basicallychoose our programming languages and run them securely in just aboutany computational surface area. We have been promised this before, butI think this time it is more likely to come to fruition. Thank you forgiving me the opportunity to explain why.