Just when you thought assembly language was dead…it’s now the newest thing to enable browser apps to run at near-native speed. WebAssembly is the next generation of browser assembly language, following on the heels of asm.js.
The latest IEEE Spectrum has the background story and intro to the subject.
The wasm stack machine is designed to be encoded in a size- and load-time-efficient binary format. WebAssembly aims to execute at native speed by taking advantage of common hardware capabilities available on a wide range of platforms.