WebAssembly and Emscripten Chat with Alon Zakai

At PSPDFKit, we are huge fans and early adopters of WebAssembly and Emscripten.

Thanks to these two technologies, we have brought the core of our PDF framework, which is comprised of 500,000+ lines of C and C++, into the browser!

Recently we had the pleasure of speaking to Alon Zakai, one of the creators of WebAssembly and the creator of Emscripten, a toolchain for compiling to asm.js and WebAssembly that lets you run C and C++ on the web.

We had a conversation about what WebAssembly is, what problems it can solve, how we use it in PSPDFKit for Web, and why you should probably be using it in your next project! We also talked a little about the future of WebAssembly, some of its current challenges, and some interesting new developments.

Below is the recording. We hope you enjoy it!

Featuring

• Alon Zakai — Twitter, Website, GitHub

• James Swift — Twitter, GitHub

• Giuseppe Gurgone — Twitter, Website, GitHub

Links

• WebAssembly

• Emscripten

• asm.js

• LLVM

• PSPDFKit for Web

• Yoga: React Native’s Layout Engine compiled to WebAssembly for an experimental project

• Blazor

• cmake

• Asyncify

• AssemblyScript

• Squoosh App