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WebAssembly
design
Web Development2015–2026
WebAssembly / design

design

WebAssembly Design Documents

Web DevelopmentProductivity
Explore on GitHubRead Hacker News discussions
196Distinct people
260Mentions
2Explicit recommenders
11.6KGitHub stars
REPOSITORY AT A GLANCE

What to know before exploring

What it is

WebAssembly Design Documents

GitHub

Where it is used

  • Shopify — Shopify uses WebAssembly within a Wasm Engine to execute partner modules on its infrastructure. The engine is invoked during runtime processes such as web requests to perform functions. Source

What people are saying

I love the fact that they chose s-expressions for the textual representation of WASM[0][1]. [0]: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/WebAssembly/Underst... [1]:…

kuwze used a recommendation phrase. 2 indexed comments match. This is a phrase match, not a verdict.

No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.

Also in these discussions

Mentioned in the same Hacker News threads. That is not proof they are substitutes.

This week on Hacker News

Nov 8–Nov 15 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/15/2026, 2:59:53 AM UTC.

No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.

Mentions over time

HN mentions by year260 dated mentions

Observed mentions: 2015-06-17 16:27:29 UTC to 2026-05-03 00:07:52 UTC.

02040602015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 53 mentions; 5 submissions, 48 comments20152016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 66 mentions; 1 submissions, 65 comments2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 66 mentions; 5 submissions, 61 comments2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 16 mentions; 0 submissions, 16 comments2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 12 mentions; 0 submissions, 12 comments2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 11 mentions; 0 submissions, 11 comments20202021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 13 mentions; 3 submissions, 10 comments2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 6 mentions; 1 submissions, 5 comments2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 7 mentions; 0 submissions, 7 comments2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 3 mentions; 0 submissions, 3 comments2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 5 mentions; 0 submissions, 5 comments2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2027-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 2 mentions; 0 submissions, 2 comments. Incomplete calendar period.2026*

* An incomplete calendar period is marked with an outlined bar. Its count is not directly comparable with a full period.

Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.

View mention counts and date ranges
UTC ranges include their start and exclude their end. Select a period to filter the source evidence.
PeriodStart (UTC)End (exclusive, UTC)MentionsSubmissionsComments
20152015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC53548
20162016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC66165
20172017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC66561
20182018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC16016
20192019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC12012
20202020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC11011
20212021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC13310
20222022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC615
20232023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC707
20242024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC303
20252025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC505
2026 (partial)2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2027-01-01 00:00:00 UTC202

What Hacker News says

53 sources
m0dc·Dec 17, 2015
Being able to view source is a design goal of WebAssembly, according to [0]. If an organization doesn't want you reading their JS, there are already plenty of tools to make it nearly impossible as-is. Do you really learn anything from reading minified, obfuscated code? At some point you're just reverse engineering, which is obviously still possible with WebAssembly. 'Open source by default' is a problem to be solved at a cultural level, not a technical one. [0] https://github.com/WebAssembly/design/blob/master/FAQ.md#wil...
In Compiling to WebAssembly: It’s Happening
dangoor·Dec 1, 2015
There are quite a few differences from the old "JScript" days. First of all: TypeScript is liberally licensed open source. JScript was totally proprietary. Another aspect is that TypeScript is seeking to be a strict superset of JavaScript that evolves as JavaScript does (something that wasn't really happening in the JScript days) and is focused on specifically providing static types and tooling for types in JS. It's not a general "embrace, extend, extinguish" kind of thing at all, but rather a very targeted tool. TypeScript is really one of the most JavaScript-y languages that compile to JS. Most of the compile-to-JS languages are more radical divergences from JS. JS is not going to be replaced (though WebAssembly[1] will likely become an additional compile target), but compile-to-JS is going to continue to grow in popularity. Already, ma
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ny people are compiling future-JS to present-day-JS. The browser vendors have found that the standards evolve best when people can actually write code against the standards before the standards are hardened. Compile-to-JS tools help with that. If optional static types and type inference become very popular via TypeScript and Flow, JS itself may evolve to support those features and then we'll have that standard. Microsoft is a better player on the web today than they have ever been before. [1]: https://github.com/WebAssembly/design
In Announcing TypeScript 1.7
pcwalton·Nov 29, 2015
> Instead, why not have the browser run a very simple instruction set (even without garbage collector) to which many scripting languages could compile. Because of its simplicity, security would be very simple to enforce. Imagine the proliferation of programming tools that would naturally occur. This exists, and you can contribute toward making it happen: https://github.com/WebAssembly/design You can even encourage sites to use Web Assembly and assorted Web APIs in lieu of HTML and CSS if you want. Now if you want to go further and deprecate and remove HTML and CSS, that won't happen. Even if we were to see a market shift toward "canvas + WebAssembly", leaving HTML and CSS unused (which I think is very unlikely), there's too much content out there that uses HTML and CSS that you will still want to browse.
In Is the web platform getting too big?
rayiner·Nov 11, 2015
I'm reminded of PG's quote that "there have been two really clean, consistent models of programming so far: the C model and the Lisp model." While the Lisp model may be better for a programming language, the C model is arguably better as a universal substrate. WebAssembly is a C machine model for the web, complete with sbrk(). It's worth perusing the design docs, it looks very sensibly designed: https://github.com/WebAssembly/design.
In WebAssembly: Here Be Dragons [video]
hn1234·Nov 10, 2015
Seth, the wasm "Text Format" doc at [1] says one of its purposes is "Presentation in browser development tools when source maps aren't present (which is necessarily the case with the Minimum Viable Product (MVP))" and that "Debuggers and profilers will present binary code using this textual format." However, bugs like [2] suggest to me that the Chrome and Firefox teams do not place an especially high priority on readability and debuggability with source maps in plain old JavaScript. Basically, it's impossible to use Chrome Devtools to see original variable names from the source file (e.g. 'jquery.js') instead of the minified file (e.g. 'jquery.min.js') mapped by the source-map file. This essentially makes source maps useless for debugging complex code and has been a known issue for almost two years. The most recent comment in that ticke
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t notes work is blocked until a new version of the sourcemap spec is shipped, but the linked resources indicate there hasn't been any public activity on them in three weeks with the Sterland proposal [3] and three months with the Fitzgerald proposal [4]. If keeping the web open source is indeed a priority of Google and Mozilla, then why haven't more resources been allocated to develop those specifications? In brief, the lack of urgency for bugs like [2] suggests to me that Google and Mozilla don't take "The JavaScript Trip" described by Stallman [5] seriously. I fear that wasm could make it much worse. - 1. https://github.com/WebAssembly/design/blob/master/TextFormat... 2. https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=327092 3. https://gist.github.com/asterland/edf028ed7947c8c258d1 4. https://github.com/fitzgen/source-map-rfc/blob/scopes-and-bi... 5. http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/javascript-trap.en.html
In Web Assembly
s3th·Nov 10, 2015
We're working hard to make sure that WebAssembly is a first-class citizen in the open web platform in ways that other native execution environments didn't accomplish. For example, it's a goal to have WebAssembly modules interopt with the ES6 module system, and as soon as GC is supported, you'll be able to access the DOM and the JavaScript context in WebAssembly [0]. Both of these are huge steps towards ensuring that wasm plays well with everything that's great about the web today. [0]: https://github.com/WebAssembly/design/blob/master/Web.md (Disclaimer: I'm a Google Chrome PM contributing to the WebAssembly project)
In Web Assembly
s3th·Nov 10, 2015
It's definitely a goal to make sure that wasm is as readable as possible. The binary format will be able to be "pretty-printed" into a textual format [0]. We haven't finalized the exact format yet, but it will be much more readable than current asm.js javascript [1]. [0]: https://github.com/WebAssembly/design/blob/master/TextFormat... [1]: https://twitter.com/BrendanEich/status/643828456631857152 (Disclaimer: I'm a Google Chrome PM contributing to the WebAssembly project)
In Web Assembly

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