JavaScript was traditionally the only native programming language of web browsers \parencite{reiser2017accelerate}. With the development of WebAssembly, there seems to be an alternative on its way. This technology, its benefits and drawbacks, will be explained in this chapter.
WebAssembly\footnote{\url{https://webassembly.org/}} started in April 2015 with an W3C Community Group\footnote{\url{https://www.w3.org/community/webassembly/}} and is designed by engineers from the four major browser vendors (Mozilla, Google, Apple and Microsoft). It is a portable low-level bytecode designed as compilation target of 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. \parencite{haas2017bringing}
The goals of WebAssembly have been well defined. Its semantics are intended to be safe and fast to execute and to 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. \parencite{haas2017bringing}
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 stated. 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. \parencite{haas2017bringing}
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. Modern engines observe the execution of running JavaScript code and will perform optimizations that can be compared to optimizations of compilers. \parencite{clark2017what}
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. \parencite{surma2018emscripting}
% 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}.
There are various compilers with WebAssembly as compilation target. In this thesis the Emscripten toolchain is used. Other notable compilers are wasm-pack\footnote{\url{https://rustwasm.github.io/}} for Rust projects and AssemblyScript\footnote{\url{https://github.com/AssemblyScript/assemblyscript}} for a TypeScript subset. This latter compiler is particularly interesting as TypeScript, itself a superset of JavaScript, is a popular choice among web developers. This reduces the friction for WebAssembly integration as it is not necessary to learn a new language.
Emscripten\footnote{\url{https://webassembly.org/}} started with the goal to compile unmodified C and C++ applications to JavaScript. This is achieved by acting as a compiler backend to LLVM assembly. High level languages compile through a frontend into the LLVM intermediate representation. Well known frontends are Clang and LLVM-GCC. From there it gets passed through a backend to generate the architecture specific machine code. Emscripten hooks in here to generate asm.js, a performant JavaScript subset. In figure \ref{fig:emscripten-chain} one such example chain can be seen. On the left is the original C code which sums up numbers from 1 to 100. The resulting LLVM assembly can be seen in the middle. It is definitely more verbose, but easier to work on for the backend compiler. Notable are the allocation instructions, the labeled code blocks and code flow moves. The JavaScript representation on the right is the nearly one to one translation of the LLVM assembly. The branching is done via a switch-in-for loop, memory is implemented by a JavaScript array named HEAP and LLVM assembly functions calls become normal JavaScript function calls like \texttt{\_printf()}. Through optimizations the code becomes more compact and only then more performant. \parencite{zakai2011emscripten}
\caption{Example code when compiling a C program (left) to asm.js (right) through LLVM bytecode (middle) without optimizations. \parencite{zakai2011emscripten}}
It is in fact this project that inspired the creation of WebAssembly. It was even called the "natural evolution of asm.js"\footnote{\url{https://groups.google.com/forum/\#!topic/emscripten-discuss/k-egXO7AkJY/discussion}}. As of May 2018 Emscripten changed its default output to WebAssembly\footnote{\url{https://github.com/emscripten-core/emscripten/pull/6419}} while still supporting asm.js. Currently the default backend named \texttt{fastcomp} generates the WebAssembly bytecode from asm.js. A new backend however is about to take its place that compiles directly from LLVM \parencite{zakai2019llvmbackend}.
The compiler is only one part of the Emscripten toolchain. Part of it are various APIs, for example for file system emulation or network calls, and tools like the compiler mentioned.
