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WebAssembly

WebAssembly (Wasm) defines a portable binary code format and a corresponding text format for executable programs and software interfaces for facilitating communication between such programs and their host environment.

History
The name "WebAssembly" is intended to suggest bringing assembly language programming to the World Wide Web, where it will be executed client-side, by the website-user's computer via the user's web browser. To accomplish this, WebAssembly must be much more hardware-independent than a true assembly language. WebAssembly was first announced in 2015, Multithreading is currently a draft, but has been supported by Chrome since version 75 in June 2019, Firefox version 79, and Safari version 14.1 The WebAssembly 2.0 specification was finished in 2022 and became a W3C standard in December 2024. It adds many single instruction, multiple data (SIMD) related instructions and a new v128 datatype, with the ability for functions to return multiple values, mass memory initialize/copy instructions, and reference types, which are opaque pointers to objects outside of the linear memory. WebAssembly 3.0 was released in September 2025. New features include a 64-bit address space, multiple address spaces, exception handling, and garbage collected struct and array types. Support for garbage collection enables more efficient compiling for high-level languages, but WasmGC from WebAssembly 3.0 lacks the abilities needed by .NET runtime. == Implementations ==
Implementations
While WebAssembly was initially designed to permit near-native code execution speed in the web browser, it has been considered valuable outside of such, in more generalized contexts. A WebAssembly runtime environment is a low-level virtual stack machine, akin to JVM or Flash VM; it can be embedded into any host application, and thus there have been created standalone WebAssembly runtime environments, including , , , and . WebAssembly runtime environments are embedded in application servers to host "server-side" WebAssembly applications and in other applications to support plug-in-based software extension architectures, e.g., WebAssembly for Proxies (Proxy-Wasm) which specifies a WebAssembly-based application binary interface (ABI) to extend proxy servers. Web browsers In November 2017, Mozilla declared support "in all major browsers",