Lin Clark on WebAssembly

Today I will talk about the podcast “Lin Clark on WebAssembly” by Software Engineering Radio in the year 2018.
First they started the interview asking Lin Clark about her life, what she did and what she is actually working on. Then she started talking about WebAssembly, and how it is faster than javascript because this was not created to be so. That’s why WebAssembly optimizes the efficiency of JS when running on browsers.  She said that the original use case of WebAssembly was visualization, but now is being used in other use cases.

This language it's not an assembly language because it is targeting a conceptual machine, it’s a compiler target. So we write in a language that compiles to WebAssembly.
When using it most people use C/C++ or Rust, those languages are way more subtle to it because they don't have garbash support and using another language will mean writing a garbage collector which I don’t think anyone will want, not even the interviewer.

Something that I did not like listening to was that the only typer that are supported were ints and float, so when it comes to string (the typical example “Hello World”) it becomes a little bit tricky because what you will need to do id to convert every character into a number and pass it into an array so WebAssembly will understand it, it also mentioned a tool to prevent this named Wasm Bindgen but this means you need to learn Rust.
I think WebAssembly is a great tool for optimization and efficiency, I hope to learn how to actually use it in the future.

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