JavaScript has been the only native programming language of web browsers for a long time. With the development of WebAssembly there seems to be an alternative on its way with high promises. This technology and the benefits and drawbacks to it will be explained in this chapter. It will be used to execute the algorithms under inspection in this thesis.
WebAssembly is designed by engineers from the four major browser vendors (Mozilla, Google, Apple, Microsoft). It is a portable low-level bytecode designed as target for compilationof high-level languages. By being an abstraction over modern hardware it is language-, hardware-, and platform-independent. It is intended to be run in a stack-based virtual machine. This way it is not restrained to the Web platform or a JavaScript environment. Some key concepts are the structuring into modules with exported and imported definitions and the linear memory model. Memory is represented as a large array of bytes that can be dynamically grown. Security is ensured by the linear memory being disjoint from code space, the execution stack and the engine's data structures. Another feature of WebAssembly is the possibility of streaming compilation and the parallelization of compilation processes. \footnote{\path{https://people.mpi-sws.org/~rossberg/papers/Haas,\%20Rossberg,
The goals of WebAssembly have been well defined. It's semantics are intended to be safe and fast to execute and bring portability by language-, hardware- and platform-independence. Furthermore it should be deterministic and have simple interoperability with the web platform. For its representation the following goals are declared. It shall be compact and easy to decode, validate and compile. Parallelization and streamable compilation are also mentioned.
These goals are not specific to WebAssembly. They can be seen as properties that a low-level compilation target for the web should have. In fact there have been previous attempts to run low-level code on the web. Examples are Microsoft's ActiveX, Native Client (NaCl) and Emscripten each having issues complying with the goals. Java and Flash are examples for managed runtime plugins. Their usage is declining however not at least due to falling short on the goals mentioned above.
It is often stated that WebAssembly can bring performance benefits. It makes sense that statically typed machine code beats scripting languages performance wise. It has to be observed however if the overhead of switching contexts will neglect this performance gain. JavaScript has made a lot of performance improvements over the past years. Not at least Googles development on the V8 engine has brought JavaScript to an acceptable speed for extensive calculations. The engine observes the execution of running javaScript code and will perform optimizations that can be compared to optimizations of compilers.
The JavaScript ecosystem has rapidly evolved the past years. Thanks to package managers like bower, npm and yarn it is simple to pull code from external sources into ones codebase. Initially thought for server sided JavaScript execution the ecosystem has found its way into front-end development via module bundlers like browserify, webpack and rollup. In course of this growth many algorithms and implementations have been ported to JavaScript for use on the web. With WebAssembly this ecosystem can be broadened even further. By lifting the language barrier existing work of many more programmers can be reused on the web. Whole libraries exclusive for native development could be imported by a few simple tweaks. Codecs not supported by browsers can be made available for use in any browser supporting WebAssembly. One example could be the promising AV1 video codec. In this these the C++ library psimpl will be utilized to bring polyline simplification to the web. This library already implements various algorithms for this task. It will be further introduced in chapter \ref{ch:psimpl}.
