Panel:


Charles Max Wood
Cory House
Aimee Knight


Special Guests: Ben Titzer

In this episode, the JavaScript Jabber panelists discuss WebAssembly and JavaScript with Ben Titzer. Ben is a JavaScript VM engineer and is on the V8 team at Google. He was one of the co-inventors of WebAssembly and he now works on VM engineering as well as other things for WebAssembly. They talk about how WebAssembly came to be and when it would be of most benefit to you in your own code.

In particular, we dive pretty deep on:


Ben intro
JavaScript
Co-inventor of WebAssembly (Wasm)
Joined V8 in 2014
asm.js
Built a JIT compiler to make asm.js faster
TurboFan
What is the role of JavaScript? What is the role of WebAssembly?
SIMD.js
JavaScript is not a statically typed language
Adding SIMD to Wasm was easier
Easy to add things to Wasm
Will JavaScript benefit?
Using JavaScript with Wasm pros and cons
Pros to compiling with Wasm
Statically typed languages
The more statically typed you are, the more you will benefit from Wasm
TypeScript
Is WebAssembly headed towards being used in daily application?
Rust is investing heavily in Wasm
WebAssembly in gaming
And much, much more!


Links:


JavaScript
V8
WebAssembly
asm.js
TurboFan
TypeScript
Rust
WebAssembly GitHub
Ben’s GitHub


Picks:

Charles


Ready Player One Movie
DevChat.tv YouTube
Alexa Flash Briefings: Add skill for “JavaScript Rants”


Cory


npm Semantic Version Calculator
Kent Beck Tweet


Aimee


MDN 418 Status code
Quantity Always Trumps Quality blog post


Ben


American Politics