WebAssembly the journey

November 26, 2017 ย 

A journey to discover the future of the web

In 2017 Willian Martins and I started to look into WebAssembly with the goal of testing its performances.

At that time we were both working in Berlin at Delivery Hero as frontend engineers. While Willian had already many many years of experience, I was just starting with frontend development (my background was more mathematics oriented).

We decided to join forces and kickoff an experiment to test how the usage of WebAssembly could impact the frontend web performance.

Elia Maino and Willian Martins working on the wasm project at Delivery Hero

We submitted our idea to the CFP of BrazilJS and got invited to speak at the 2017 edition of the conference, which took place in Porto Alegre and Fortaleza during the month of August.

A video of the talk itโ€™s available on YouTube.

Elia Maino and Willian Martins talking at BrazilJS 2017

Our test

We developed a simple implementation of Conwayโ€™s Game of Life in 3 different ways:

  • VanillaJS
  • C compiled to WebAssembly using emscripten
  • Web Workers (multi thread)

Check the video above to discover who won ๐Ÿ˜ฎ

And if you want to take a look at the code, itโ€™s open-source on GitHub.

More on that

My friend Willian Martins wrote a couple of cool articles about our journey, theyโ€™re both available on Medium:

Check them out there!