Paul Krill
Editor at Large

JavaScript founder Brendan Eich: WebAssembly is a game-changer

news
Mar 10, 20162 mins

Speaking at the O'Reilly Fluent conference, Eich also endorsed the Service Workers mobile app technology, WebGL, and Decorators for JavaScript

When it comes to the Web’s future, JavaScript creator Brendan Eich remains bullish on WebAssembly but also gives a thumbs-up to Service Worker technology.

Speaking at the O’Reilly Fluent conference in San Francisco on Wednesday, Eich called WebAssembly the most exciting development he has seen in the past year. The project boosts Web performance by providing a portable code format to run in browsers at native speeds. Major browser vendors Apple, Google, Microsoft, and Mozilla all are on board with the effort.

The technology, serving as a binary syntax, started with the asm.js subset of JavaScript. At some point, WebAssembly “becomes the safe native format for the Web,” he said, adding it will help bring the Web equal to native applications in performance.

Eich, CEO of Brave Software, also lauded Service Workers technology, which supports bootstrapping of mobile Web applications while offline and are part of Google and Mozilla’s Progressive Web Apps plan. The concept of Service Workers is supported in the Extensible Web Manifesto philosophy, and Eich encouraged developers to learn about it.

Eich also backs the Decorators plan by Ember.js creator Yehuda Katz. Decorators is a JavaScript proposal to annotate and modify classes and properties at design time. Additionally, Eich lauded WebGL, which provides a 3D rendering standard for Web development.

During his 20-minute presentation, Eich linked development of Web standards to mobile platforms: “What we’re now seeing is the co-evolution of the Web standards with the two dominant smartphone OSes — Android and iOS.”

Microsoft, meanwhile has been “kind of acting like Mozilla,” with its venture into open source, Eich reasoned. “They open-sourced Chakra Core, their JavaScript engine, on GitHub.” Google’s Android, meanwhile, has become Windows, but Apple remains Apple, in Eich’s estimation.

When it comes to JSON pioneer Douglas Crockford’s Seif project to boost Web security through the use of cryptographic services and trust management, Eich is taking a wait-and-see approach. “It’s not probably going to get wide adoption, this Project Seif,” said Eich.

Paul Krill

Paul Krill is editor at large at InfoWorld. Paul has been covering computer technology as a news and feature reporter for more than 35 years, including 30 years at InfoWorld. He has specialized in coverage of software development tools and technologies since the 1990s, and he continues to lead InfoWorld’s news coverage of software development platforms including Java and .NET and programming languages including JavaScript, TypeScript, PHP, Python, Ruby, Rust, and Go. Long trusted as a reporter who prioritizes accuracy, integrity, and the best interests of readers, Paul is sought out by technology companies and industry organizations who want to reach InfoWorld’s audience of software developers and other information technology professionals. Paul has won a “Best Technology News Coverage” award from IDG.

More from this author