web-dsp

I'm curious too. From a quick search, I found WebDSP, "A client-side DSP library utilizing the power of WebAssembly". https://github.com/shamadee/web-dsp > WebDSP is a collection of highly performant algorithms, which are designed to be building blocks for web applications that aim to operate on media data. > The methods are written in C++ and compiled to WASM, and exposed as simple vanilla Javascript functions developers can run on the client side. ..On further reading, they have functions for video and image processing, but not audio as far as I can tell. --- There's Glissando, "A web-based digital audio workstation using the web platform APIs (Web Audio, Web MIDI) and WebAssembly". https://github.com/glissando-daw/glissando-app They mention "VST support", but I cannot imagine how that's possible from the web.

I'm not 100% sure about any of this (I've only listened to most of the video above), but I think the gist is that WebAssembly provides a compile target for applications, meaning you can pre-compile an application so that your source is downloaded essentially as machine code. Furthermore, that means your compilation can perform as many optimizations that you care for, because it's happening ahead of time (not on the user's machine). Without WebAssembly, browser vendors have to strike a balance between optimizing the JS as much as possible (for increased performance), and running the script as soon as possible (so the user isn't waiting too long for execution to begin). edit: Demo of this in-browser video editor charts a FPS difference between the JS and WebAssembly implementations. https://github.com/shamadee/web-dsp

A tool called Emscripten provides a runtime environment. You can include things from that, like a virtual filesystem. That said, a lot of WebAssembly code doesn't have a dependency on file APIs. For example, you can check out the web-dsp project: https://github.com/shamadee/web-dsp If you're looking for an intro, I wrote a series of posts on WebAssembly (there are 5 links at the bottom of this intro): https://hacks.mozilla.org/2017/02/a-cartoon-intro-to-webasse...