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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 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 11:00:58 PM 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

66 sources
wahern·Nov 2, 2016
Signed integers in C don't wrap around. That's undefined behavior. Unsigned integers behave modulo 2^n, so if you want wrap around in C you should be using unsigned integers. Any C compiler to WebAssembly would have to implement unsigned behavior regardless of the semantics of WebAssembly's native unsigned operations. For information on the semantics of WebAssembly arithmetic, see https://github.com/WebAssembly/design/blob/master/Semantics.... For other information about WebAssembly start here https://github.com/WebAssembly/design/
In WebAssembly Browser Preview
CalChris·Nov 1, 2016
The WA stack machine was added late in the game. Before that it was an AST but they got pushback from browser backend people and pivoted to a stack machine. https://github.com/WebAssembly/design/issues/755 AST was a good idea and parsing as validation was excellent. Having a general stack machine makes validation much more difficult. This is a bad decision (stacks vs AST or register) made for the wrong reason (code size). That's a 1990s design assumption when memory was expensive and bandwidth was dear. Now memory is cheap; bandwidth is phenomenal; and latency is expensive.
In WebAssembly Stack Machine

Showing the 15 most recent of 66 sources. Enable JavaScript to search and browse every indexed mention.

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