WebAssembly Weekly - WebAssembly Weekly News

Issue #129

I’m trying out a slightly different distribution model this week, with the email newsletter (from mailchimp) generated automatically from the RSS feed of the online version. Hopefully this will all work ok, but if you spot an issue, please do let me know!

There has been quite a bit of WebAssembly ‘fun’ on twitter this week, Ben Smith shared a CHIP8 emulator hand-written in wasm. I’d recommend checking out his other creations, the raytracer is my favourite!

There was also a sighting of WebAassembly running on a Tesla, via the UnoPlatform (which allows you to write wasm apps in C#). Very cool.

How WebAssembly changes software distribution

desiatov.com

Sometimes it is useful to remind ourselves whey WebAssembly was created and what problems it solves. This is a great blog post that starts by looks at the decline of various plugin models, ActiveX, Flash, Silverlight, then asks the question, hasn’t JavaScript solved the problems the plugins tried to address? Finally it looks it why WebAssembly shows great promise. A very enjoyable read.

First impressions of NEAR smart contract development in Rust

github.io

NEAR is a blockchain implementation that runs smart contracts on a WebAssembly Virtual Machine. If you’ve not created a smart contract before this can be a bit of a confusing environment to work in. Fortunately NEAR has a really good developer experience. This post looks at creating a smart contract in Rust - I actually had a go with NEAR a few months back using AssemblyScript and can concur, it is one of the easiest blockchains to work with.

Webassembly Without The Browser Part 2

lexene.dev

Part 1 of this series looked at writing a Rust application, compiling and running it on Wasmtime - as a standalone application. This next part looks at how you can debug (via breakpoints and inspection) a WebAssembly application. This is particularly useful, I’ve struggled with debugging in the past - and it is simply not supported (beyond inspecting the raw wasm execution) on many plaforms.

And Finally

Miguel de Icaza placed a bet that Fortnite could work in Safari without going through the AppStore (using wasm of course) - much debate ensued!