WebAssembly or wasm is an experimental efficient low-level programming language for in-browser client-side scripting, which is currently in development. Its initial aim is to support compilation from C/C++,[1]though other source languages are also intended to be supported. WebAssembly is a portable abstract syntax tree[2] which is designed to be faster to parse than JavaScript, as well as faster to execute.[1] The initial implementation of WebAssembly support in browsers will be based on asm.js[3] and PNaCl.[4] After the minimum viable product (MVP) release, there are plans to support garbage collection[5] which would make WebAssembly a compilation target for garbage collected programming languages like Java and C#. The team working on WebAssembly includes people from Mozilla, Google, Microsoft, and Apple (who respectively control the four major browsers, Firefox, Chrome, Microsoft Edge, and Safari).[4]
WebAssembly was first announced on 17 June 2015[6] and on 15 March 2016 was demonstrated executing Unity‘s Angry Bots in Firefox,[7] Chrome,[8] and Microsoft Edge.[9]