Introduction

I’m old enough to have lived through quite a few seismic changes in the way developers build software and the kinds of products we can build. I was just starting my career when DPMI gave us native access to 32-bit integers, allowed unfettered access to a heap greater than 640k, and enabled the creation of ground-breaking games like DOOM. I remember the potential behind Java’s promise of write once, run anywhere. I was there when small, local communities built around dial-up bulletin board systems (BBSes) faded as the world became a single, digital community riding the wave of the Internet’s surge toward ubiquity. I experienced the shift in solution design from client/server to fat server to fat client and back again, today landing on cloud native applications, microservices, and independent functions where everything including our infrastructure is a service.

I remember the web’s growth from a billion archipelagos of text (often blinking!) and Under Construction signs where the coolest places were the ones with the most intricate full-page background images, to the vast, sprawling engine of commerce, communication, lifestyle, and social connection that it is today. The web has gone from a place where only an elite few dabbled in that strange new world to a place where millions of people spend their days coding some of the most powerful and complex applications of the modern era.

I firmly believe that we stand on the precipice of another seismic change—WebAssembly. This new technology holds within it the potential to radically change how developers build applications for the web. Moreover, as you’ll see throughout this book, WebAssembly is more than just a new pebble thrown into the ocean of web technologies. It’s a tsunami that can change not only how consumers interact with and how developers build applications but also fundamentally alter the kinds of applications we can create. It may even transform our core definition of the word application.