That link seems to broken. Here the original link https://github.com/WebAssembly/spec/raw/master/papers/pldi20...
Definitely a good read.
In Ask HN: What was the best CS paper you read in 2017?WebAssembly
spec
WebAssembly2015–2026
WebAssembly / spec
spec
WebAssembly specification, reference interpreter, and test suite.
41Distinct people
53Mentions
1Explicit recommenders
3.5KGitHub stars
What to know before exploring
What it is
WebAssembly specification, reference interpreter, and test suite.
GitHub
Where it is used
No documented product use was verified in the last source check.
What people are saying
They often forget to mention, that WebAssembly is just a low-level programming language (much lower than C), it has extremely simple syntax (it has just four data types, no…
IvanK_net used a recommendation phrase. One indexed comment matches. 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
- webassembly/design · linked in 5 of the same discussions
- webassembly/wabt · linked in 4 of the same discussions
- webassembly/binaryen · linked in 2 of the same 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, 7:02:50 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 year53 dated mentions
Observed mentions: 2015-09-03 02:59:47 UTC to 2026-05-25 19:07:52 UTC.
* 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
| Period | Start (UTC) | End (exclusive, UTC) | Mentions | Submissions | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2015 | 2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2 | 0 | 2 |
| 2016 | 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 9 | 1 | 8 |
| 2017 | 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 17 | 4 | 13 |
| 2018 | 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 5 | 0 | 5 |
| 2019 | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 3 | 0 | 3 |
| 2020 | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2021 | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2022 | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 5 | 0 | 5 |
| 2023 | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2024 | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2025 | 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 4 | 0 | 4 |
| 2026 (partial) | 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2027-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 5 | 1 | 4 |
From the project README
An excerpt from the repository, fetched Nov 13, 2026.
Read the project’s introduction
spec
This repository holds the sources for the WebAssembly specification,
a reference implementation, and the official test suite.
A formatted version of the spec is available here:
webassembly.github.io/spec,
Participation is welcome. Discussions about new features, significant semantic
changes, or any specification change likely to generate substantial discussion
should take place in
the WebAssembly design repository
first, so that this spec repository can remain focused. And please follow the
guidelines for contributing.
citing
For citing WebAssembly in LaTeX, use this bibtex file.
Read the full README on GitHubWhat Hacker News says
17 sourcesBringing The Web Up To Speed With WebAssembly
https://github.com/WebAssembly/spec/blob/master/papers/pldi2...
In Ask HN: What was the best CS paper you read in 2017?I saw some tests, but WASM edge cases can get pretty complicated (especially around post-unreachable stack validation logic). I suggest "git-submoduling" the stuff from "core" at https://github.com/WebAssembly/spec/tree/master/test. This is a pretty good test suite for both your parser and your interpreter and doesn't require too much work on the part of a harness to support.
In A WebAssembly interpreter written in JavaScriptThe thread's a bit old, but I'll reply anyways.
> Scala, Ceylon, Clojure provide their own stdlibs.
On top of the JVM ones when targeting the JVM. E.g. java.lang.String (Kotlin too)
> You can write non-OOP programs in Java bytecode
Everything is still an object and all code is in methods. There is no way around that. Also, there are many other things like forced GC and what not that marry the bytecode to certain paradigms.
> it's about ensuring that if someone claims they run Java bytecode, they actually can run it.
And about their impls of java.lang and other base packages. And a way to make sure that licenses that Oracle doesn't like, such as non-OpenJDK-derived open source stdlib impls, are not given the tests. Other languages with compat tests publish them for all and yet aren't worried about losing their name. This is dangerous reaso
Read the rest
ning to apply to keeping things opaque.
It isn't just those big companies implementing WASM. I implemented a WASM backend for the JVM [0]. The core test suite, which I use and comply with 100%, is available to all [1].
0 - https://github.com/cretz/asmble/
1 - https://github.com/WebAssembly/spec/tree/master/test
> People don't learn.
Do you? The comparison with Java has been made before, including on HN.
"While Java and Flash [2] came early to the Web and offered managed runtime plugins, neither supported highperformance low-level code, and today usage is declining due to security and performance issues. We discuss the differences between the JVM and WebAssembly in Section 8. "
https://github.com/WebAssembly/spec/blob/master/papers/pldi2...
In WebAssembly support now shipping in all major browsersIf you're on mobile, requesting the desktop site causes it to show up, or if not, here's a direct link: https://github.com/WebAssembly/spec/raw/master/papers/pldi20....
In Bringing the web up to speed with WebAssembly [pdf]Bringing the web up to speed with WebAssembly [pdf]
13 points · Open discussion"Microsoft’s ActiveX[1] was a technology for code-signing x86 binaries to run on the Web. It relied entirely upon code signing and thus did not achieve safety through technical construction, but through a trust model."
https://github.com/WebAssembly/spec/blob/master/papers/pldi2...
In Web Assembly Working Group Charter ApprovedI think you're misunderstanding Fil's point: JS is more expressive, and can often encode more things in a smaller package.
For same-code wasm / asm.js / x86 comparison (not what Fil was talking about) see section 7.3:
https://github.com/WebAssembly/spec/blob/master/papers/pldi2...
Additionally, WebAssembly definitely needs to be parsed. See:
https://github.com/WebKit/webkit/blob/master/Source/JavaScri...
and
https://github.com/WebKit/webkit/blob/master/Source/JavaScri...
Granted, that's simpler than parsing JavaScript.
In Assembling WebAssemblyThat is incorrect. See:
https://github.com/WebAssembly/spec/blob/master/papers/pldi2...
These are already old numbers, and section 7.3 says 33.7% more efficient. Were one to run updated numbers, and use more than Chrome and Firefox, I'm pretty sure the numbers would be better still.
In Assembling WebAssemblyYou might be interested in this thread from a few weeks ago. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14341623
For me, the most helpful comment in that discussion was a link to this paper, written by the WebAssembly designers.
https://github.com/WebAssembly/spec/blob/master/papers/pldi2...
In WebAssembly 101: A developer’s first stepsThe text format (.wast/.wat) should be derivable from the source (though I've no idea how to do this). From [1]:
> The design goals for a WebAssembly text format derive from the following use cases:
> View Source on a WebAssembly module, thus fitting into the Web (where every source can be viewed) in a natural way.
[1] http://webassembly.org/docs/text-format/
EDIT: looks like this [2] can convert between binary and textual format.
[2] https://github.com/WebAssembly/spec/tree/master/interpreter/
In Show HN: A WebAssembly game demoThey often forget to mention, that WebAssembly is just a low-level programming language (much lower than C), it has extremely simple syntax (it has just four data types, no system calls, the specification takes 5 pages instead of 500 pages of C spec). You may call it a "bytecode", but typical bytecodes also have around-500-page specifications.
Also, its relation to javascript is not any bigger than the relation to any other programming language (i.e. there is no relation). A WebAssembly VM could be made as an extension of any environment.
I recommend reading the official paper https://github.com/WebAssembly/spec/blob/master/papers/pldi2... (I learned more than about 50 "essays" that I read about WASM in the past).
In An Abridged Cartoon Introduction To WebAssemblyBringing the Web Up to Speed with WebAssembly [pdf]
2 points · Open discussionThis paper is great for understanding WASM in depth:
https://github.com/WebAssembly/spec/blob/master/papers/pldi2...
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