How WebAssembly Actually Runs in Your Browser: From Stack Machine to Machine Code
In April 2015, Luke Wagner made the first commits to a new repository called WebAssembly/design, adding a high-level design document for what would become the fourth language of the web. The project emerged from a convergence of efforts: Mozilla’s asm.js experiment had demonstrated that a strictly-typed subset of JavaScript could approach native speeds, while Google’s PNaCl and Microsoft’s efforts in this space had explored similar territory. What none of these projects achieved was cross-browser consensus. WebAssembly was designed from the start as a collaborative effort, with formal semantics written in parallel with its specification. ...