Running C, C++, or Rust in a Web Browser

What is web assembly (WASM)? Why does it attract so much attention?

The diagram shows how we can run native C/C++/Rust code inside a web browser with WASM.

Traditionally, we can only work with Javascript in the web browser, and the performance cannot compare with native code like C/C++ because it is interpreted.

However, with WASM, we can reuse existing native code libraries developed in C/C++/Rust, etc to run in the web browser. These web applications have near-native performance.

For example, we can run the video encoding/decoding library (written in C++) in the web browser.

This opens a lot of possibilities for cloud computing and edge computing. We can run serverless applications with fewer resources and instant startup time.