Why Should You Consider JavaScript on WebAssembly? - Angel Maria De Miguel Meana & Saúl Cabrera
Channel: The Linux Foundation
Date: 04/10/2023

Why Should You Consider JavaScript on WebAssembly? - Angel Maria De Miguel Meana, VMware & Saúl Cabrera, Shopify

JavaScript is one of the most widely used programming languages, powering applications from the frontend to the backend. This makes it one of the most popular languages across a wide variety of environments. However, there are environments in which it's more challenging to get access to a JavaScript runtime. In these situations, how can we run JavaScript code?

WebAssembly opens new possibilities for running JavaScript securely in new places. This talk introduces WebAssembly (Wasm), explains how and why you might be interested in compiling JavaScript into a Wasm module, and how the Javy project makes this process straightforward.

This talk also showcases how the different design decisions in Wasm, can substantially improve JavaScript's performance and security. The sandboxing model provides strong security guarantees as well as ahead-of-time optimization opportunities which allow for startup time optimizations. Some of these optimizations are generally more challenging to achieve in other environments.

All these features make JavaScript in WebAssembly a great combination. We will show different use cases and solutions that follow this approach and why it was worth the effort.