AssemblyScript: making WebAssembly more accessible to JavaScript programmers
tl;dr This is an introduction to AssemblyScript: I explain what WebAssembly is, why AssemblyScript maybe an interesting alternative to build WebAssembly for JavaScript developers and, finally, in order to compare JavaScript to AssemblyScript, I comment a small image manipulation project I’ve developed for this purpose.
WebAssembly is one of the biggest revolutions coming to the web, although it is neither Web nor Assembly. WebAssembly, also known as Wasm, is a fast, efficient, safe and low-level bytecode for the Web.
This means that, on one hand, it isn’t an assembly language but bytecode instead. Although both of them are similar in the sense that they are not high-level languages, they are easily understandable, which is something that does not happen with machine code. Thus, they can be classified into an intermediate language category between high-level languages and machine code. The main difference between assembly language and bytecode is that, the first one is created for CPUs while the second is created for virtual machines. That is, one is targeting hardware whereas the other is targeting software.
There is indeed a bytecode textual version, which is named WebAssembly Text Format (or just Wat!).
