Last week, Google enabled WebAssembly Garbage Collection (Wasm GC) in Chrome. This is a significant development, as it is likely to lead to more web developers using WasmGC. 

WasmGC makes developing better web apps easier. It helps manage memory, moves existing code to the web, and supports faster real-time apps. Google’s support for WasmGC in Chrome shows their dedication to WebAssembly tech.

This update has the potential to make JavaScript more unpopular among developers than it already is. It is widely used to make interactive webpages. 

Eloff, a software developer posted on X, “Web Assembly GC is a big deal. Web assembly was like the universal machine, an instruction set compilers could target that runs everywhere.”

Prior to WebAssembly, JavaScript was one of the few programming languages that could be used to develop web applications. However, JavaScript is not known for its performance, especially for complex applications. WebAssembly solves this problem by allowing developers to use high-performance programming languages to develop web applications.

What it means for web developers

WebAssembly is a new technology that allows developers to use programming languages other than JavaScript to develop web applications.  The garbage collection feature in Wasm makes it even better because it frees developers from having to worry about manually managing memory. 

WasmGC automatically manages memory allocation and deallocation, which allows developers to focus on developing the core functionality of their web applications.

Porting languages to new architectures commonly involves recompiling the VM to support the architecture. While the traditional approach works for WebAssembly (Wasm), the Wasm Garbage Collection (WasmGC) proposal addresses its specific limitations. 

WasmGC manages structs and arrays via the Wasm VM’s GC implementation, offering a high-level advantage and tighter integration with the target VM. It helps in minimising shipped memory management code, reducing binary size, and efficiently handling cycle collection through bidirectional links between Wasm and JavaScript, enabling proper references between both.

Stiff competition for JavaScript

“JavaScript is suddenly no longer the only real game in town it seems,” said one user on HackerNews

WebAssembly potentially poses a challenge to JavaScript’s popularity due to its inherent advantages. Wasm’s compiled nature from languages like C and C++ allows for faster execution compared to JavaScript, which is an interpreted language known to be slower.

WebAssembly’s adaptability to various platforms, in contrast to JavaScript’s limitations in this area, enhances its portability. Moreover, the sandboxed environment in WebAssembly improves security by isolating it from other browser components, an advantage lacking in JavaScript, which faces more potential security threats.

The garbage collection feature for WebAssembly was proposed in 2017. Most of the work, however, was done in the last three years. The growing number of users building with WebAssembly has prompted the default option in Chrome, Edge and Firefox. 

Though JavaScript and WebAssembly have two distinct roles in web development in performance and speed, the latter stands out. WASM is generally faster than JavaScript due to its pre-compiled nature and efficient execution directly on the hardware, while JavaScript is interpreted, leading to relatively slower execution speeds. A paper published comparing the performance of the two languages concluded that Wasm has improved energy efficiency by 30%. 

Unlike JavaScript, Wasm code can be compiled for various hardware architectures, ensuring portability across different devices and platforms. Additionally, it supports multiple programming languages, allowing seamless interactions among them. 

Execution of Wasm occurs in a sandboxed environment, which isolates it from the primary browser thread, offering improved security by limiting unauthorised access to system resources. This is the crucial difference between the two languages. With most of the hacks online taking place on the browsers Wasm offers security advantages on a number of fronts. 

Sounil Yu, chief information security officer at JupiterOne, said, “Wasm has a limited set of instructions and better memory management, which helps reduce the attack surface for vulnerabilities and prevents some common types of vulnerabilities such as buffer overflows.”

Wasm code also offers a bit of security through obscurity by not being human-readable, making it harder for attackers to reverse-engineer the code and thus more difficult to discover and exploit vulnerabilities.

JavaScript has the largest number of users in web development with more than 63%. It is the foundation of modern web development, offering ease of use, widespread support, and seamless integration with the browser’s DOM. WebAssembly is fairly new, released only in March. In 2022, 67% of respondents of the State of WebAssembly survey were frequently using WebAssembly, which is a big jump from 47% in 2021. Now, WebAssembly is used to build sites by sites with most traffic. WasmGC will only push this popularity.

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