WebAssembly Articles
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Securing Firefox with WebAssembly
Protecting the security and privacy of individuals is a central tenet of Mozilla’s mission. While we continue to make extensive use of both sandboxing and Rust in Firefox to address security challenges in the browser, each has its limitations. Today we’re adding a third approach to our arsenal. RLBox, a new sandboxing technology developed by researchers at the University of California, San Diego, and the University of Texas, Austin, allows us to quickly and efficiently convert existing Firefox components to run inside a WebAssembly sandbox.
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Using WebAssembly from .NET with Wasmtime
Wasmtime, the WebAssembly runtime from the Bytecode Alliance, recently added an early preview of an API for .NET Core, Microsoft’s free, open-source, and cross-platform application runtime. This API enables developers to programmatically load and execute WebAssembly code directly from .NET programs. Although .NET Core is already a cross-platform runtime, there are good reasons for .NET developers to take a closer look at WebAssembly, as Peter Huene demonstrates in this post.
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Multi-Value All The Wasm!
Multi-value is a proposed extension to core WebAssembly that enables functions to return many values, among other things. It is also a prerequisite for Wasm interface types. Nick Fitzgerald has been adding multi-value support all over the place recently, started with the Rust and WebAssembly toolchain. Next he added support to the Wasmtime runtime, and the Cranelift code generator it’s built on top of. Here's his account of the journey.
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Announcing the Bytecode Alliance: Building a secure by default, composable future for WebAssembly
Lin Clark introduces the Bytecode Alliance, and uses Code Cartoon illustrations to share their vision of a WebAssembly ecosystem that is secure by default, fixing cracks in today’s software foundations. Based on advances in the emerging WebAssembly community, founding members of the Alliance - Mozilla, Fastly, Intel, and Red Hat - believe we can make this vision real. And we invite others to join the collaboration.
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Debugging WebAssembly Outside of the Browser
WebAssembly has begun to establish itself outside of the browser via dedicated runtimes like Mozilla’s Wasmtime and Fastly’s Lucet. While the promise of a new, universal format for programs is appealing, it also comes with new challenges. At Mozilla, we’ve been prototyping ways to enable source-level debugging of .wasm files using existing tools, like GDB and LLDB.
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WebAssembly Interface Types: Interoperate with All the Things!
People are excited about running WebAssembly outside the browser. People are also excited about running WebAssembly from languages like Python, Ruby, and Rust. Lin Clark's Code Cartoons are back, illustrating an in-depth look at WebAssembly Interface Types, and the proposed spec to make it possible for WASM to interoperate with All The Things!
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Pyodide: Bringing the scientific Python stack to the browser
Pyodide is an experimental project from Mozilla to create a full Python data science stack that runs entirely in the browser. We think it’s worthwhile to work on moving the JavaScript data science ecosystem forward, and that's why we built and released Iodide earlier this year. In the meantime, we’re meeting data scientists where they are by bringing the popular and mature Python scientific stack to the browser.
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Standardizing WASI: A system interface to run WebAssembly outside the web
WebAssembly is an assembly language for a conceptual machine, not a physical one. This is why it can be run across a variety of different machine architectures. WebAssembly needs a system interface for a conceptual operating system, not any single operating system. This way, it can be run across all different OSs. WASI is a system interface for the WebAssembly platform that will be a true companion to WebAssembly and uphold the key principles of portability and security.
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Fast, Bump-Allocated Virtual DOMs with Rust and Wasm
Dodrio is a new virtual DOM library that is designed to leverage the strengths of both Wasm’s linear memory and Rust’s low-level control by making extensive use of fast bump allocation. Early benchmarking results validate Dodrio’s design and show that it already has best-in-class performance. Now we're seeking feedback from real-world usage.
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WebAssembly’s post-MVP future: A cartoon skill tree
People have a misconception—they think that the WebAssembly that landed in browsers back in 2017—is the final version. In fact, we still have many use cases to unlock, from heavy-weight desktop applications, to small modules, to JS frameworks, to all the things outside the browser… Node.js, and serverless, and the blockchain, and portable CLI tools, and the internet of things. The WebAssembly that we have today is not the end of this story—it’s just the beginning.
