Microsoft offers preview of WebAssembly support in an internal Microsoft Edge build

Last year, Microsoft announced that they are implementing WebAssembly, a new, portable, size and load-time-efficient binary format suitable for compiling to the web. Edge team was working with Firefox, Chrome, WebKit and the community to keep the WebAssembly principles and design moving forward in the W3C Community Group.

Today, they gave us an early preview of experimental WebAssembly support in an internal Microsoft Edge build with the AngryBots demo(watch it above), alongside similar previews for Firefox and Chrome.

Despite being an early implementation, the demo starts-up significantly faster than just using asm.js as the WebAssembly binaries have a smaller file size and parse more quickly than plain JavaScript that needs to be parsed in the asm.js case.

With ChakraCore now open source, we have been developing our WebAssembly implementation entirely in the open in the WebAssembly branch of our ChakraCore repo on GitHub. Under the hood, our implementation is able to reuse much of the existing asm.js infrastructure. The WebAssembly code goes through the same pipeline as the asm.js code would, after it has been parsed.